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To Give and to Give Not: the behavioral ecology of human food transfers

Gurven, Michael To Give and to Give Not: the behavioral ecology of human food transfers.

Short Abstract:

This paper attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models of food transfers in traditional populations—reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the extent to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. This paper introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies, paying particular attention to the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities

Long Abstract:

The transfer of food among group members is an ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among unrelated individuals, has led researchers to evaluate numerous hypotheses about the adaptive functions and patterns of sharing in different ecologies. This paper attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models—reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the extent to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. Each model can explain some of the variance in sharing patterns within groups, and so generalizations that ignore or deny the importance of any one model may be misleading. Careful multivariate analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of food transfer patterns are therefore necessary tools for assessing aspects of the sexual division of labor, human life history evolution, and the evolution of the family. This paper also introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies. I discuss the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities as a key feature that influences sharing behavior.

Keywords:	behavioral ecology, costly signaling, cooperation, food sharing, foragers, reciprocal altruism
Comments:	I will be in Bolivia from June 30, 2002 until July or August 2003. I will be in sporadic email contact at chatidye@hotmail.com. I would appreciate it if all correspondence could be sent to this email address.
Subjects:	Biology: Behavioral Biology Biology: Sociobiology Psychology: Evolutionary Psychology
ID code:	bbs00001257
Deposited by:	Michael Gurven on 31 May 2002
Alternative Locations:	http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/gurvbbs.htm