Hawkes Kristen, O'Connell James F, Jones Nicholas G Blurton
Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, 270 S 1400 E Room 102, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112-0600, USA,
Hum Nat. 2014 Dec;25(4):596-619. doi: 10.1007/s12110-014-9212-5.
Unlike other primate males, men invest substantial effort in producing food that is consumed by others. The Hunting Hypothesis proposes this pattern evolved in early Homo when ancestral mothers began relying on their mates' hunting to provision dependent offspring. Evidence for this idea comes from hunter-gatherer ethnography, but data we collected in the 1980s among East African Hadza do not support it. There, men targeted big game to the near exclusion of other prey even though they were rarely successful and most of the meat went to others, at significant opportunity cost to their own families. Based on Hadza data collected more recently, Wood and Marlowe contest our position, affirming the standard view of men's foraging as family provisioning. Here we compare the two studies, identify similarities, and show that emphasis on big game results in collective benefits that would not be supplied if men foraged mainly to provision their own households. Male status competition remains a likely explanation for Hadza focus on big game, with implications for hypotheses about the deeper past.
与其他灵长类雄性不同，人类男性会投入大量精力生产供他人食用的食物。狩猎假说认为，这种模式在早期人类中就已形成，当时祖先母亲开始依赖配偶的狩猎来养活需要抚养的后代。这一观点的证据来自对狩猎采集社会的人种志研究，但我们在20世纪80年代在东非哈扎人那里收集的数据并不支持这一观点。在那里，男性几乎只捕猎大型猎物而不捕猎其他猎物，尽管他们很少成功，而且大部分肉都给了其他人，这给他们自己的家庭带来了巨大的机会成本。基于最近收集的哈扎人数据，伍德和马洛质疑了我们的观点，肯定了男性觅食是为家庭提供食物的传统观点。在这里，我们比较了这两项研究，找出了相似之处，并表明对大型猎物的关注带来了集体利益，如果男性主要为自己的家庭觅食，这些利益就不会出现。男性地位竞争仍然可能是哈扎人专注于大型猎物的原因，这对关于更久远过去的假说有影响。
