How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills?

Abstract

Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observation, and participation. By the end of middle childhood, most children are proficient food collectors. However, it is not until adolescence that adults (not necessarily parents) begin directly teaching children complex skills such as hunting and complex tool manufacture. Adolescents seek to learn innovations from adults, but they themselves do not innovate. These findings support predictive models that find social learning should occur before individual learning. Furthermore, these results show that teaching does indeed exist in hunter-gatherer societies. And, finally, though children are competent foragers by late childhood, learning to extract more complex resources, such as hunting large game, takes a lifetime.

Physical activity and time budgets of Hadza forager children: Implications for self‐provisioning and the ontogeny of the sexual division of labor

“…By adolescence, significant sex differences emerged for every type of in-camp work. This trend is similar to other small-scale societies, including Mayan agriculturalists (Kramer, 2005), Mikea foragers (Tucker & Young, 2005), Aka foragers, Ngandu farmers (Lew-Levy & Boyette, 2018), and among foragers more generally (Lew-Levy et al, 2017). The increase in females' time spent in food processing (and corresponding lack of change in time spent in food processing for males) corresponds directly to their patterns of moderate levels of exertion, as more than 50% of moderate activities are related to food processing.…”

“…Indeed, the Hadza, like other foragers, maintain a strong sexual division of labor in adulthood (Kelly, 1995;Marlowe, 2007), and it appears that young male and female foragers begin targeting sex-specific resources (ie, plants for females and animal products for males) by middle childhood (Crittenden, 2016b;Crittenden et al, 2013). While previous cross-cultural studies on forager children's gendered participation in play and work suggest that the Hadza, like other foragers, begin conforming to the sexual division of labor in their culture in middle childhood or adolescence (eg, Boyette, 2016;Gallois, Duda, Hewlett, & Reyes-garcía, 2015;Lew-Levy et al, 2017), a recent meta review of the literature on forager children's learning found no published studies on the development of gendered behaviors among the Hadza (Lew-Levy et al, 2017). Thus, data on foraging returns and activity budgets are critical in determining when sex-specific patterns emerge and how caloric contributions relate to energy balance and age.…”

Cultural Selection Shapes Network Structure

“…As the individual's repertoire size R i is the number of non-zero trait proficiencies l, trait acquisition increases R i . To become better at performing a trait repeated engagement with it is required, as learning takes time [38][39][40][41] . Therefore, proficiency increases with each successful asocial or social learning attempt of the same trait so that l 0 t = l t + 1.…”

“…Our counter-intuitive results are driven by two factors, one at the individual level, the other at the network. At the individual level, we assume that successful social learning requires repeated engagement with the same trait, corresponding to the fact that learning in nature takes time and does not happen at the first contact with a novel trait [38][39][40][41] . Our learning model is therefore akin to complex contagion transmission of behaviour 18 , and di ers from previous cultural learning models that largely relied on simple infection contagion 45;46 .…”

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology: 2017 Redux

“…Cultural variation in humans is unique among animals and differs dramatically even from our closest primate relatives (Boyette & Hewlett, ; Henrich, ; Lew‐Levy, Reckin, Lavi, Cristóbal‐Azkarate, & Ellis‐Davies, ; Mesoudi, Chang, Murray, & Lu, ; Terashima & Hewlett, ). Here culture is defined as “group‐typical behaviors shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland & Hoppitt, ).…”