Hunter-gatherer diets and human behavioral evolution

Veile, Amanda

doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2018.05.023

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 95 publications

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“…A forager must have the knowledge to locate the tuber, the strength to excavate it, and the skill to make and use appropriate tools (9). Food items embedded in hard substratum, mobile prey, or food products requiring specialized technologies for the most part require high levels of both strength and knowledge for successful extraction (26,27). To investigate whether complex resources are associated with slower learning curves and, thus, the evolution of longer childhoods, research is needed to quantify variation in the ontogeny of foraging productivity according to resource type complexity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood

2022

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Our species’ long childhood is hypothesized to have evolved as a period for learning complex foraging skills. Researchers studying the development of foraging proficiency have focused on assessing this hypothesis, yet studies present inconsistent conclusions regarding the connection between foraging skill development and niche complexity. Here, we leverage published records of child and adolescent foragers from 28 societies to (i) quantify how skill-intensive different resources are and (ii) assess whether children’s proficiency increases more slowly for more skill-intensive resources. We find that foraging returns increase slowly for more skill-intensive, difficult-to-extract resources (tubers and game), consistent with peak productivity attained in adulthood. Foraging returns for easier-to-extract resources (fruit and fish/shellfish) increase rapidly during childhood, with adult levels of productivity reached by adolescence. Our findings support the view that long childhoods evolved as an extended period for learning to extract complex resources characteristic of the human foraging niche.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood

2022

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“…A forager must have the knowledge to locate the tuber, the strength to excavate it, and the skill to make and use appropriate tools (8). Food items embedded in hard substratum, mobile prey, or food products requiring specialized technologies for the most part require high levels of both strength and knowledge for successful extraction (25,26). To investigate whether complex resources are associated with slower learning curves, and thus the evolution of longer childhoods, research is needed to quantify variation in the ontogeny of foraging productivity according to resource type complexity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood

Pretelli¹,

Ringen²,

Lew‐Levy³

2022

Preprint

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Our species' long childhoods may have evolved as a period for learning complex foraging skills. Observational studies focusing on the development of foraging proficiency are an important line of evidence to assess this hypothesis. Currently, the literature on children's foraging is mixed, with investigators coming to inconsistent conclusions about how long it takes to become a proficient forager. In this study, we leverage published records of child and adolescent foragers from 28 societies to: (1) characterize the ontogeny of foraging returns and (2) assess how resource complexity structures variation across foraging contexts. We ?find that foraging returns increase slowly for more skill-intensive, difficult-to-extract resources (tubers and game), consistent with peak productivity attained later in adulthood. However, foraging returns for easier-to-extract resources (fruit and ?shellfish) increase rapidly during childhood, with adult levels of productivity reached by adolescence. Thus, the apparent match between the duration of childhood and the amount of time it takes to become a good forager is cross-culturally variable - it depends on the type of resources available for children to forage.

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“…But in some cases they were also consumed by the general population (e.g., among the Huichol of Mexico, the híkuri cactus, Lophophora williamsii , is used by men, women, and children: Myerhoff, 1974 ). Hunters and gatherers likely learned about hallucinogenic plants as part of their detailed environmental knowledge (see e.g., Veile, 2018 ), and smaller scale societies placed high cultural value on the personal revelations produced ( Boyer, 2019 ), which is attested to in the recurring mythological roles ascribed to the these mind-altering materials ( Guerra-Doce, 2014 , 2015 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution

Arce¹,

Winkelman

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Our hominin ancestors inevitably encountered and likely ingested psychedelic mushrooms throughout their evolutionary history. This assertion is supported by current understanding of: early hominins’ paleodiet and paleoecology; primate phylogeny of mycophagical and self-medicative behaviors; and the biogeography of psilocybin-containing fungi. These lines of evidence indicate mushrooms (including bioactive species) have been a relevant resource since the Pliocene, when hominins intensified exploitation of forest floor foods. Psilocybin and similar psychedelics that primarily target the serotonin 2A receptor subtype stimulate an active coping strategy response that may provide an enhanced capacity for adaptive changes through a flexible and associative mode of cognition. Such psychedelics also alter emotional processing, self-regulation, and social behavior, often having enduring effects on individual and group well-being and sociality. A homeostatic and drug instrumentalization perspective suggests that incidental inclusion of psychedelics in the diet of hominins, and their eventual addition to rituals and institutions of early humans could have conferred selective advantages. Hominin evolution occurred in an ever-changing, and at times quickly changing, environmental landscape and entailed advancement into a socio-cognitive niche, i.e., the development of a socially interdependent lifeway based on reasoning, cooperative communication, and social learning. In this context, psychedelics’ effects in enhancing sociality, imagination, eloquence, and suggestibility may have increased adaptability and fitness. We present interdisciplinary evidence for a model of psychedelic instrumentalization focused on four interrelated instrumentalization goals: management of psychological distress and treatment of health problems; enhanced social interaction and interpersonal relations; facilitation of collective ritual and religious activities; and enhanced group decision-making. The socio-cognitive niche was simultaneously a selection pressure and an adaptive response, and was partially constructed by hominins through their activities and their choices. Therefore, the evolutionary scenario put forward suggests that integration of psilocybin into ancient diet, communal practice, and proto-religious activity may have enhanced hominin response to the socio-cognitive niche, while also aiding in its creation. In particular, the interpersonal and prosocial effects of psilocybin may have mediated the expansion of social bonding mechanisms such as laughter, music, storytelling, and religion, imposing a systematic bias on the selective environment that favored selection for prosociality in our lineage.

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Hunter-gatherer diets and human behavioral evolution

Cited by 12 publications

References 95 publications

Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood

Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood

Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood

Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution

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