by Think about walking: where you need to go, how fast you need to move to get there, and whether you need to bring something to carry the results of your reference.
Are you going on this walk with someone else? Does walking with a friend change your preparation? If you are walking with a child, do you remember to bring an extra jumper or snacks? You probably did – because people instinctively change their plan depending on their current needs and situations.
In my research as an anthropologist, I focused on the evolution of human walking and running because I love the flexibility that people bring to these behaviors. People in all kinds of environments vary across space and time in how far they go, when they go and what they do – whether food, water or friends – based on a multitude of factors, including season, light day, ritual and family.
Anthropologists divide their studies of human activity into two broad categories: what people need to do – including eating, keeping their children alive and so on – and what solutions they come up with to meet these needs. to achieve.
A key question in my research is how people keep their children alive because it has a direct impact on whether a population will survive. It turns out that children stay alive if they are with adults. To that end, it is universally human that women carry heavy loads every day, including children and their food. This need-based behavior appears to have been an important part of our evolutionary history and explains many aspects of human physiology and female morphology, such as the female lower center.
Solutions to other key problems, such as the food women will carry specifically, vary across time and space. I suggest that these differences are as central to explaining human biology and culture as the needs themselves.
Effects of unusual activities
Evolutionary scientists often focus on how beneficial heritable traits are passed on to offspring when they provide a survival advantage. Eventually a trait can become more common in a population when it provides a useful solution.
For example, researchers have made great claims about the impact of endurance hunting through endurance running on the way the human body developed. This theory suggests that our ability to run long distances is compromised by running to exhaustion – by increasing our sweat capacity, strengthening our head support and ensuring our lower limbs are light. and elastic.
But persistent hunting occurs in less than 2% of the hunting cases recorded in one major ethnographic database, making it a very rare solution to the need to find food. Could such an unusual and unusual type of movement have had a strong enough influence to select for the set of adaptive traits that make today’s elite human endurance athletes?
Persistent foraging may actually be a fallback strategy, providing a solution only at key moments when survival is on the edge. Or maybe these abilities are just side effects of the charged walk done every day. I think a better argument is that the ability to predict how to move between common and uncommon strategies has been driven by human persistence.
The influence of everyday life on evolution
Hunting itself, especially large mammals, is hardly ubiquitous, despite how often it is discussed. For example, anthropologists tend to generalize that people who lived in the Arctic even up to a hundred years ago only ate the meat of animals that were hunted by men. But in reality, the original ethnographic work shows a much more nuanced picture.
Women and children were actively involved in hunting, and it was a strongly seasonal activity. Coastal fishing, berry picking and the use of plant material were essential to the daily sustenance of the Arctic people. Small family groups used canoes for coastal foraging for part of the year.
During other seasons, the whole community participated in the hunting of large mammals by herding them into dangerous positions where they were easily killed. Sometimes family groups were together, and sometimes large communities were together. Sometimes women hunted with rifles, and sometimes children ran after Caribou.
The dynamic nature of daily life means that the relatively rare activity of hunting large terrestrial vertebrates is unlikely to be the main behavior that helps humans solve the main problems of food, water and keeping children alive.
Anthropologist Rebecca Bliege Bird has investigated the predictability of food throughout the day and year. She notes that in most communities, catching big game is rare, especially when one hunts alone. Even among the Hadza in Tanzania, who are generally considered a big game hunting community, hunters get an average of 0.03 prey per day – essentially 11 animals per year for that person.
Bird and others clearly argue that flexible planning and coordination by females is the critical aspect of how humans live on a day-to-day basis. It is the daily efforts of women that allow people to be spontaneous a few times a year to carry out high risk activities such as hunting – survival or otherwise. So it is the flexibility of women that allows communities to survive between the great undergame opportunities.
Changing roles and contributions
Some anthropologists argue that behavior in some parts of the world varies more for cultural reasons, like the tools you make, than for environmental ones, like how much daylight there is during the winter. The importance of culture means that the solutions vary more than the needs.
One of the aspects of culture that changes is the role assigned to a particular gender. Different gender roles relate to the distribution of labor and when people take on certain tasks based on solutions. In most cultures, these roles change over a woman’s life. In American culture, this would be like a grandparent returning to college to nurture a childhood passion to take a new job to send their grandchildren to college.
In many places, females go from youth when they could carry their siblings and firewood, to early parenthood where they could go hunting with a child on their backs, to older parenthood where they could water carried on their heads, a child on their backs and tools in their hands, until post-menopausal periods when they could carry huge quantities of mangoes and firewood to and from the camp.
Although it is always a burden behavior, part of what motivates us is our ability to plan and change our behavior for different environments Homo sapiens‘ success, meaning that the behavior of women across their various stages of life was a key driver of this ability.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
It was written by: Cara Wall-Scheffler, University of Washington.
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Cara Wall-Scheffler does not work for, consult with, share in, or be funded by any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has not disclosed any relevant interests beyond their academic appointment.
