Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by dint of Catherine PanterBrick, Robert H. Layton, and Peter Rowly-Conwy Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Pres 2001 341 pp $3000 (paperback), $8550 (hardback).

Hunter-Gatherers is an important collection that aims to combine a broader range of perspectives than novel books on hunter-gatherers have, and the editors seek for to summarize current understanding of the enormous diversity in ecology biology, and social organization and activity of hunting and gathering populations. After a brief introductory chapter through the editors that reviews the different approaches to definition and characterization of hunter-gatherers, the ensuing 10 chapters take a cross-cultural, diachronic, and comparative approach to a number of issues of special relevance to hunter-gatherers. These issues include behavioral ecology (B Winterhalder); the archeological record upon complexity and relationship to agriculture (P Rowly-Conwy); the analysis of variability in technology (R Torrence); comparison of near and past subsistence and technology ( L Kuhn and M C Stiner); the prehistory and history of hunter-gatherer language shift and language spread (P McConvell); lock opener debates concerning demography (R. Pennington); nutritional ecology (M R Jenike); evolutionary replications to climate, diet, and disease (A. Froment); approaches to the investigation of artwork and artistry (M W Conkey); and relations with non-hunter-gatherers and nationstates (R Layton). I wait for that several of these chapters will become widely cited through human biologists.

Bruce Winterhalder presents one of the most concise and lively of his several summaries of the application of optimal foraging theory to humans. An initial section summarizes by what means we can analyze the strategic importance of variation in diet resource selection and patch residence, habitat use, residential and logistic mobility, field processing, harvest transportation, and territoriality. Then Winterhalder provides a timely and concise review of not long ago generated theoretical debate and data upon food transfers in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of hunter-gatherer social foraging and clump life. Teasing apart the evolutionary and human biological implications of scrounging, reciprocity, showing not upon costly signaling, risk minimization, and possibly other unnoticed forms of sustenance transfer is an exciting challenge for behavioral ecological and nutritional anthropologists, and it has the potential to contribute enormously to originals of the evolution of human sociality, life history, and diversity in hunter-gatherer and other subsistence strategies. The chapter could work for as a primer for scholars interested in these sorts of studies, although single might quibble that the discussion of the four "regular features" of huntergatherers (apparent underproduction and lack of material accumulation, meat sharing, egalitarianism, and gendered division of labor) debars "complex" hunter-gatherers such as those in the American Pacific Northwest and archeological populations from Central Europe Japan, and other regions.

Mark Jenike presents a helpful summary and review of greatest in quantity of the available data upon diet composition, energy intake, physical activity, and material substance size and proportion among novel and extant hunter-gatherer populations. These data, although piecemeal and drawn from sole a handful of populations, evidence a striking diversity in adaptive rejoinder to the socioecological factors that link bodies and diets in different settings. The figure in the chapter that displays the range of body mass index values for men and women in various populations in relation to cut-off indicating chronic potency deficiency (CED) is especially valuable. Although the figure confirms the general impression that hunter-gatherers are usually able to avoid serious undernutrition, the indication that women are at risk of C in smaller populations and the observation that for many populations these aggregate mean values are shut up to the 18.5 cut-off value force us to cast away the notion that hunter-gatherers rarely experienced nutritional stres Rather, Jenike at hands a picture of modern hunter-gatherers as having diverse and highly plastic biocultural rejoinders to different dimensions of meat shortage, and he concludes that mild to moderate nutritional stres is almost certainly underdetect among ancient hunter-gatherers.

Renee Pennington marshals various lines of data to support the argument that human population growing was almost negligible throughout greatest in quantity of our foraging history because of infertility resulting from infectious disease. Although the inference that "there were for a like reason few of us for with equal reason much of our history" is based upon tenuous estimates or untested genetic moulds it does seem odd, given the tremendous capacity of humans to fine-tune female reproductive output in relation to resources, shorten birth intervals, and share child caregiving among kin and across generations. Pennington finishs from a review of the wide variation in observ total fertility rates (26 to 80) for new hunter-gatherers that differential prevalence of sexually transmitted disease is a better predictor than differences in age-specific timing of births. She also notes that the apparent increase in total fertility rates reported for several populations following adjustment is probably caused by improvements in infectious disease direction rather than by the accompanying change in subsistence ecology Pennington then provides a succinct summary of a certain quantity of possible flaws in the assumptions of Blurton Jones's "backload model" to explain stretch outed !Kung birth spacing (Blurton Jone 1986) and questions the amplitude to which lactational infertility can check population development Pennington's argument is compelling and has all sorts of implications for modeling the selective squeezings on human ancestors and the expansion to which foraging strategies influenced reproductive rates. However, novel clinical data on the effectiveness of lactational amenorrhea courses of birth control (Labbok et al. 1997) and continued advances in our understanding of human reproductive ecology (Valeggia and Ellison 2001) will infallibly foster further debate about these issues.