What about survivorship to maturity?158 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLE this is very odd, and they don't evfen attempt to explain it -they also don't mention the growth spurt... They don't really define the juvenile phase or present data, though this is one of their most important variables...

What about survivorship to maturity?158 Evolutionary Anthropology ARTICLE this is very odd, and they don't evfen attempt to explain it -they also don't mention the growth spurt... They don't really define the juvenile phase or present data, though this is one of their most important variables...

BackgroundEpigenetic biomarkers of aging (the “epigenetic clock”) have the potential to address puzzling findings surrounding mortality rates and incidence of cardio-metabolic disease such as: (1) women consistently exhibiting lower mortality than men despite having higher levels of morbidity; (2) racial/ethnic groups having different mortality rates even after adjusting for socioeconomic differences; (3) the black/white mortality cross-over effect in late adulthood; and (4) Hispanics in the United States having a longer life expectancy than Caucasians despite having a higher burden of traditional cardio-metabolic risk factors.ResultsWe analyzed blood, saliva, and brain samples from seven different racial/ethnic groups. We assessed the intrinsic epigenetic age acceleration of blood (independent of blood cell counts) and the extrinsic epigenetic aging rates of blood (dependent on blood cell counts and tracks the age of the immune system). In blood, Hispanics and Tsimane Amerindians have lower intrinsic but higher extrinsic epigenetic aging rates than Caucasians. African-Americans have lower extrinsic epigenetic aging rates than Caucasians and Hispanics but no differences were found for the intrinsic measure. Men have higher epigenetic aging rates than women in blood, saliva, and brain tissue.ConclusionsEpigenetic aging rates are significantly associated with sex, race/ethnicity, and to a lesser extent with CHD risk factors, but not with incident CHD outcomes. These results may help elucidate lower than expected mortality rates observed in Hispanics, older African-Americans, and women.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13059-016-1030-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This study investigates variation in body growth (cross-sectional height and weight velocity) among a sample of 22 small-scale societies. Considerable variation in growth exists among hunter-gatherers that overlaps heavily with growth trajectories present in groups focusing more on horticulture. Intergroup variation tends to track environmental conditions, with societies under more favorable conditions displaying faster growth and earlier puberty. In addition, faster/earlier development in females is correlated with higher mortality. For example, African "Pygmies," Philippine "Negritos," and the Hiwi of Venezuela are characterized by relatively fast child-juvenile growth for their adult body size (used as a proxy for energetic availability). In these societies, subadult survival is low, and puberty, menarche, and first reproduction are relatively early (given their adult body size), suggesting selective pressure for accelerated development in the face of higher mortality. In sum, the origin and maintenance of different human ontogenies may require explanations invoking both environmental constraints and selective pressures.

Post-reproductive longevity is a robust feature of human life and not only a recent phenomenon caused by improvements in sanitation, public health, and medical advances. We argue for an adaptive life span of 68-78 years for modern "Homo sapiens" based on our analysis of mortality profiles obtained from small-scale hunter-gatherer and horticultural populations from around the world. We compare patterns of survivorship across the life span, rates of senescence, modal ages at adult death, and causes of death. We attempt to reconcile our results with those derived from paleodemographic studies that characterize prehistoric human lives as "nasty, brutish, and short," and with observations of recent acculturation among contemporary subsistence populations. We integrate information on age-specific dependency and resource production to help explain the adaptive utility of longevity in humans from an evolutionary perspective. Copyright 2007 The Population Council, Inc..

This paper has two interrelated goals. The first is to offer a general theory of fertility and parental investment across a broad spectrum of human societies. The second is t o provide a perspective that unifies traditionally separate domains of anthropology. The basic foundation for the analysis is life history theory and evolutionary biological models of optimal fertility regulation. This tradition is combined with human capital theory in economics to produce a more general theory of investments in embodied capital within and between generations. This synthesis results in a series of optimality models to examine the decision processes underlying fertility and parental investment upon which natural selection is expected to act. Those models are then applied to the hunting and gathering lifeway. This analysis focuses both on problems that all hunting and gathering peoples face and on the production of variable responses in relation to variable ecologies. Next, this consideration of optimal parental investment and fertility behavior in hunter-gatherers is united with existing models of the proximate determinants of human fertility. The analysis of proximate mechanisms is based on the idea that natural selection acts on the final phenotypic outcome of a coordinated system of physiological, psychological and cultural processes. The important conditions affecting parental investment and fertility in modern socioeconomic contexts are then discussed. An explanation of modern fertility and parental investment behavior in terms of the interaction of those conditions with the physiological and psychological mechanisms that evolved during our hunting and gathering history is proposed. The proposal is that skills-based competitive labor markets increase the value of parental investment in children and motivate better-educated, higher income parents to invest more per child than their less-educated, lower-earning counterparts. It is also suggested that the deviation from fitness maximization associated with low modern fertility is due to excess expenditures on both parental and offspring consumption, indicating that our evolved psychology is responding to cues in the modern environment that are not directly related to the fitness impacts of consumption. 0 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.The principal strength of anthropology is its scope. The field encompasses both the evolution of the hominid line and the variation among and within cultures through time. A principal weakness of the discipline is the lack of an overarching theory that unifies the field. There is one especially critical point of disjunction. It is the relationship between biological processes of evolution and behavior. Instead of treating that relationship as a fundamental theoretical problem to be solved, the field has been content, 0 1996 WILEY-LISS, INC.

The evolution of life is the result of a process whereby variant forms compete to harvest energy from the environment and convert it into replicates of those forms. Individuals "capture" energy from the environment-for example through foraging, hunting, or cultivating-and "allocate" it to reproduction and survival-enhancing activities. Selection favors individuals who efficiently capture energy and effectively allocate it to enhance fitness within their ecological niche.

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