Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

Abstract

The division of labor has typically been portrayed as a complementary strategy in which men and women work on separate tasks to achieve a common goal of provisioning the family. In this paper, we propose that task specialization between female kin might also play an important role in women's social and economic strategies. We use historic group composition data from a population of Western Desert Martu Aborigines to show how women maintained access to same-sex kin over the lifespan. Our results show that adult women had more same-sex kin and more closely related kin present than adult men, and they retained these links after marriage. Maternal co-residence was more prevalent for married women than for married men, and there is evidence that mothers may be strategizing to live with daughters at critical intervals-early in their reproductive careers and when they do not have other close female kin in the group. The maintenance of female kin networks across the lifespan allows for the possibility of cooperative breeding as well as an all-female division of labor.

Matrilateral Bias in Human Grandmothering

“…Recent studies concur. Among the Martu of Western Australia, married women have more natal kin in their residential camps than do married men, and this is especially true for the youngest mothers, who cannot yet use older children to help care for younger siblings (Scelza and Bliege Bird, 2008). The story is apparently similar among the Alyawarra of central Australia, where Denham (2015) further suggests that MGMs help more than PGMs partly because the former are 14 years younger, on average; this is an important consideration, but his data also show that a matrilateral bias in alloparental assistance is not limited to grandmothers.…”

Sex‐biased weaning and early childhood diet among middle holocene hunter–gatherers in Central California

“…Moreover, the majority of weaning studies have been conducted among agricultural and industrial populations. Although there are exceptions (Barry and Paxson, 1971;Hill and Hurtado, 1996;Blurton-Jones et al, 1994, 1997Howell, 1999;Kaplan et al, 2000;Konner, 2005; p 57; Scelza and Bliege-Bird, 2008), significantly less is known about weaning and early childhood diets in hunter-gatherer populations. Because there are so few hunter-gatherer groups around the world today, and because many modern behaviors have evolutionary roots in hunting and gathering settings, reconstructing weaning behaviors from ancient hunter-gatherer populations provides an important and independent data set to test anthropological, evolutionary, and ecological hypotheses about parental investment strategies.…”

Size and Shape: Morphology's Impact on Human Speed and Mobility

“…This increase is likely due to the steepness of the male CoT curve which shows dramatically higher costs at slower walking speeds (Figure 1). It is possible that the energetic constraints around walking speeds help explain widespread ethnographic observations of single sex travel parties, who often travel different distances 6 Journal of Anthropology [74,[77][78][79][80]. In fact, new work on the Hadza suggests that sex differences in spatial awareness stem specifically from the fact that males travel alone and females travel together [81].…”