The Life History Of Human Foraging: Cross-Cultural And Individual Variation

Koster, Jeremy; McElreath, Richard; Hill, Kim; Yu, Douglas W.; Shepard, Glenn H.; Vliet, N. Van; Gurven, Michael; Kaplan, Hillard; Trumble, Benjamin C.; Bird, Rebecca Bliege; Bird, Douglas W.; Codding, Brian F.; Coad, Lauren; Pacheco-Cobos, Luis; Winterhalder, Bruce; Lupo, Karen D.; Schmitt, David; Sillitoe, Paul; Franzen, Margaret A.; Alvard, Michael; Venkataraman, Vivek V.; Kraft, Thomas S.; Endicott, Kirk; Beckerman, Stephen; Marks, Stuart A.; Headland, Thomas N.; Pangau-Adam, Margaretha; Sirén, Anders; Kramer, Karen L.; Greaves, Russell D.; Reyes‐García, Victoria; Guèze, Maximilien; Duda, Romain; Fernández‐Llamazares, Álvaro; Gallois, Sandrine; Napitupulu, Lucentezza; Ellen, Roy; Ziker, John P.; Nielsen, Martin Reinhardt; Ready, Elspeth; Healey, Christopher; Ross, Cody T.

doi:10.1101/574483

Cited by 30 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…In this model, organisms could acquire adaptive behaviour through individual learning or one-shot interactions with a demonstrator at the beginning of their lives. Many essential skills in real animals, however, take generations to evolve and years to develop, which is particularly true for complex and causally opaque human culture [5,48]. If adaptive behaviour takes time and practice to develop, longer lifespans should allow individuals to reach higher skill levels and to fully capitalize on cultural information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of life history and population regulation for the evolution of social learning

Deffner

McElreath

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Social learning and life history interact in human adaptation, but nearly all models of the evolution of social learning omit age structure and population regulation. Further progress is hindered by a poor appreciation of how life history affects selection on learning. We discuss why life history and age structure are important for social learning and present an exemplary model of the evolution of social learning in which demographic properties of the population arise endogenously from assumptions about per capita vital rates and different forms of population regulation. We find that, counterintuitively, a stronger reliance on social learning is favoured in organisms characterized by ‘fast’ life histories with high mortality and fertility rates compared to ‘slower’ life histories typical of primates. Long lifespans make early investment in learning more profitable and increase the probability that the environment switches within generations. Both effects favour more individual learning. Additionally, under fertility regulation (as opposed to mortality regulation), more juveniles are born shortly after switches in the environment when many adults are not adapted, creating selection for more individual learning. To explain the empirical association between social learning and long life spans and to appreciate the implications for human evolution, we need further modelling frameworks allowing strategic learning and cumulative culture. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The importance of life history and population regulation for the evolution of social learning

Deffner

McElreath

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…We used a dynamical, life-history model of learning (Koster et al 2020) to assess the effect of age on subsistence knowledge. For the learning/transmission responses, we included a second-order polynomial term for age to capture potential recall biases among older individuals ( Figure S6).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Koster et al (2020), we use the von Bertalanffy growth model (1934) to represent knowledge accumulation across the lifespan. For a given age , knowledge ( ) increases at a learning rate , proportional to how much age-structured knowledge there is left to learn (Figure 2).…”

Section: H1: Tasks Ranked As More Difficult Are Learned At a Later Agementioning

confidence: 99%

The life history of learning subsistence skills among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo

Lew‐Levy¹,

Ringen²,

Crittenden³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Aspects of human life history and cognition, such as our long childhoods and extensive use of teaching, theoretically evolved to facilitate the acquisition of complex tasks. The present paper empirically examined the relationship between subsistence task difficulty and age of acquisition, rates of teaching, and rates of oblique transmission among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo. We further examined cross-cultural variation in how and from whom learning occurred. Learning patterns and community perceptions of task difficulty were assessed through interviews. We found no relationship between task difficulty, age of acquisition, and oblique transmission, and a weak but positive relationship between task difficulty and rates of teaching. While same-sex transmission was normative in both societies, tasks ranked as more difficult were more likely to be transmitted by men among the BaYaka, but not among the Hadza, potentially reflecting cross-cultural differences in the sexual division of subsistence and teaching labor. Further, the BaYaka were more likely to report learning via teaching, and less likely to report learning via observation, than the Hadza, possibly due to differences in socialization practices. These findings suggest that patterns of transmission are highly variable across cultures.

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“…This view suggests that life history characteristics drive shifts in cognitive development, such that a longer juvenile period can allow for longer periods of cognitive development and skill refinement. This proposal is supported by evidence from human forager populations indicating that individuals may not exhibit adult‐like hunting or foraging skills until adulthood (Gurven, Kaplan, & Gutierrez, ; Kaplan et al, ; Koster et al, ). Taking a broader comparative perspective, primates also exhibit a relatively extended juvenile period, which has been proposed to stem from the long time needed to acquire skills to exploit complex diets (Ross & Jones, ; although note that young chimpanzees already exhibit adult‐like dietary breadth; Bray, Emery Thompson, Muller, Wrangham, & Machanda, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Heterochrony in chimpanzee and bonobo spatial memory development

Rosati

2019

American J Phys Anthropol

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Objectives: The emergence of human-unique cognitive abilities has been linked to our species' extended juvenile period. Comparisons of cognitive development across species can provide new insights into the evolutionary mechanisms shaping cognition. This study examined the development of different components of spatial memory, cognitive mechanisms that support complex foraging, by comparing two species with similar life history that vary in wild ecology: bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Materials and methods: Spatial memory development was assessed using a crosssectional experimental design comparing apes ranging from infancy to adulthood.Study 1 tested 73 sanctuary-living apes on a task examining recall of a single location after a 1-week delay, compared to an earlier session. Study 2 tested their ability to recall multiple locations within a complex environment. Study 3 examined a subset of individuals from Study 2 on a motivational control task.Results: In Study 1, younger bonobos and chimpanzees of all ages exhibited improved performance in the test session compared to their initial learning experience. Older bonobos, in contrast, did not exhibit a memory boost in performance after the delay. In Study 2, older chimpanzees exhibited an improved ability to recall multiple locations, whereas bonobos did not exhibit any age-related differences. In Study 3, both species were similarly motivated to search for food in the absence of memory demands.Discussion: These results indicate that closely related species with similar life history characteristics can exhibit divergent patterns of cognitive development, and suggests a role of socioecological niche in shaping patterns of cognition in Pan.

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The Life History Of Human Foraging: Cross-Cultural And Individual Variation

Cited by 30 publications

References 24 publications

The importance of life history and population regulation for the evolution of social learning

The importance of life history and population regulation for the evolution of social learning

The life history of learning subsistence skills among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo

Heterochrony in chimpanzee and bonobo spatial memory development

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