The hunting handicap: costly signaling in human foraging strategies
- R. Bliege Bird, E. Smith, D. Bird
- EconomicsBehavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
- 6 June 2001
It is concluded that relatively inefficient hunting or sharing choices may be maintained in a population if they serve as costly and reliable signals designed to reveal the signaler's qualities to observers.
The “fire stick farming” hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal foraging strategies, biodiversity, and anthropogenic fire mosaics
- R. Bliege Bird, D. Bird, B. Codding, C. Parker, J. Jones
- Environmental ScienceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- 30 September 2008
This work combines ethnographic observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity.
Delayed Reciprocity and Tolerated Theft: The Behavioral Ecology of Food-Sharing Strategies
- D. Bird
- PsychologyCurrent Anthropology
- 1 February 1997
Models derived from behavioral ecology may have the potential to explain a great deal of variability in food-sharing patterns within and between human societies. We use quantitative observational…
Behavioral Ecology and Archaeology
- D. Bird, J. O'connell
- Sociology
- 13 June 2006
Behavioral ecology is the study of adaptive behavior in relation to social and environmental circumstances and holds that the reproductive strategies and decision-making capacities of all living organisms—including humans—are shaped by natural selection.
Constraints of knowing or constraints of growing?
Testing the prediction that children should reach adult levels of efficiency faster when foraging is cognitively simple finds no significant amount of variability in return rates and strong age-related effects on efficiency for shellfish collecting.
Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men's Work
- K. Hawkes, J. O'connell, G. Wenzel
- Economics
- 24 October 2001
Hadza hunter-gatherers display economic and social features usually assumed to indicate the dependence of wives and children on provisioning husbands and fathers. The wives and children of better…
The benefits of costly signaling: Meriam turtle hunters
It is found that successful hunters gain social recognition, have an earlier onset of reproduction, achieve higher age-specific reproductive success, and gain higher quality mates, who also achieve above-average reproductive success.
Risk and reciprocity in Meriam food sharing
- R. Bird, D. Bird, E. Smith, Geoff Kushnick
- Economics
- 1 July 2002
Aboriginal hunting buffers climate-driven fire-size variability in Australia’s spinifex grasslands
- R. Bliege Bird, B. Codding, Pete Kauhanen, D. Bird
- Environmental ScienceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- 11 June 2012
It is shown that Aboriginal fires are smaller, more tightly clustered, and remain small even when climate variation causes huge fires in the lightning region, suggesting that Aboriginal hunters should be considered trophic facilitators and policies aimed at reducing the risk of large fires should promote land-management strategies consistent with Aboriginal burning regimes.
Children on the reef
- D. Bird, R. Bliege Bird
- PsychologyHuman Nature
- 1 June 2002
While foraging on the reef, children are significantly less selective than adults, consistent with a hypothesis that both children and adults attempt to maximize their rate of return while foraging, but in so doing they face different constraints relative to differences in walking speeds while searching.
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