Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure

@article{Hill2011CoResidencePI,
  title={Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure},
  author={Kim R. Hill and Robert S. Walker and Miran Bozicevic and James F. Eder and Thomas N. Headland and Barry Hewlett and Ana Magdalena Hurtado and Frank W. Marlowe and Polly Wiessner and Brian M. Wood},
  journal={Science},
  year={2011},
  volume={331},
  pages={1286 - 1289}
}
Individuals in residential groups in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are unrelated to each other. Contemporary humans exhibit spectacular biological success derived from cumulative culture and cooperation. The origins of these traits may be related to our ancestral group structure. Because humans lived as foragers for 95% of our species’ history, we analyzed co-residence patterns among 32 present-day foraging societies (total n = 5067 individuals, mean experienced band size = 28.2 adults… 
View on AAAS
anth.uconn.edu
660 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
21
Background Citations
229
Methods Citations
6
Results Citations
14

660 Citations

Human Residence Patterns

TLDR
This essay addresses the significance and evidence surrounding the debate about how hunter-gatherers and other humans organize their residential groups by suggesting that human societies are quite variable and flexible in nature.

Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies.

Relatedness within and between Agta residential groups

TLDR
Patterns of relatedness among the Palanan Agta, hunter–gatherers from the northern Philippines are described, finding no major age or sex differences in the relatedness of adults to their campmates, conditions that may reduce the potential for conflicts of interest within social groups.

Characterization of hunter-gatherer networks and implications for cumulative culture

TLDR
It is shown that interactions with non-kin appear in childhood, creating opportunities for collaboration and cultural exchange beyond family at early ages, and that strong friendships are more important than family ties in predicting levels of shared knowledge among individuals.

Human Female Dispersal and Social Organization: A Case of Central African Hunter-Gatherers

TLDR
It is demonstrated that hunter-gatherer societies are not necessarily characterized by female dispersal but have more social flexibility, and the Babongo Pygmies have been strongly influenced by many external factors, particularly the social characteristics of neighboring farmers.

Networks of Food Sharing Reveal the Functional Significance of Multilevel Sociality in Two Hunter-Gatherer Groups

Scaling of Hunter-Gatherer Camp Size and Human Sociality

One of the most common tendencies of human settlements is for larger settlements to display higher population densities. Work in urban science and archaeology suggests that this densification pattern…

Antiquity and Social Functions of Multilevel Social Organization Among Human Hunter-Gatherers

TLDR
It is concluded that key features of modern human hunter-gatherer social organization probably appear in the course of the evolution of Homo heidelbergensis.

Hunter-Gatherer Inter-Band Interaction Rates: Implications for Cumulative Culture

TLDR
Interactions between same-sex adult dyads of Ache and Hadza hunter-gatherers living in multiple distinct residential bands are presented, showing high probabilities of cultural and cooperative interactions between randomly chosen adults and suggesting ritual relationships increase interaction rates more than kinship, and that affinal kin interact more often than dyads with no relationship.

High-resolution maps of hunter-gatherer social networks reveal human adaptation for cultural exchange

TLDR
It is shown that strong friendships with non-kin optimize the global efficiency of their social networks thereby facilitating cultural exchange and that the adaptation for forming friendship ties appears early in development.
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 43 REFERENCES

Cooperative breeding in South American hunter–gatherers

  • K. HillA. Hurtado
  • Biology
    Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
  • 2009
TLDR
Demographic and food acquisition data show that most breeding pairs can expect food deficits owing to foraging luck, health disabilities and accumulating dependency ratio of offspring in middle age, and that extra-pair provisioning may be essential to the evolved human life history.

To give and to give not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers

  • M. Gurven
  • Psychology
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
  • 2004
The transfer of food among group members is a ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among…

The emergence of human uniqueness: Characters underlying behavioral modernity

TLDR
Data suggest that humans living as hunter‐gatherers would have attained a world population of more than 70 million individuals and a total biomass greater than that of any other large vertebrate on the planet if agriculture had not been repeatedly invented as they spread.

Altruistic cooperation during foraging by the Ache, and the evolved human predisposition to cooperate

TLDR
Data show that Ache men and women spend about 10% of all foraging time engaged in altruistic cooperation on average, and that on some days they may spend more than 50% of their forager time in such activities.

Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior

TLDR
A population model shows that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation.

Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania

  • M. KlineR. Boyd
  • Biology
    Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
  • 2010
TLDR
It is shown that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology, suggesting that demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation.

Reciprocal altruism, rather than kin selection, maintains nepotistic food transfers on an Ache reservation

Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society

TLDR
This book discusses the origins of human society, the evolution of human Behavior, and the building blocks of Exogamy and Reconstructing Human Society: The Task Ahead.

Egalitarianism in young children

TLDR
It is shown that young children’s other-regarding preferences assume a particular form, inequality aversion that develops strongly between the ages of 3 and 8, which indicates that human egalitarianism and parochialism have deep developmental roots.

A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity

TLDR
A theory is proposed that unites and organizes observations and generates many theoretical and empirical predictions that can be tested in future research by comparative biologists, archeologists, paleontologists, biological anthropologists, demographers, geneticists, and cultural anthropologists.