Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.
Am Econ Rev. 2003;93(1):150-69. doi: 10.1257/000282803321455205.
The economics of hunting and gathering must have driven the biological evolution of human characteristics, since hunter-gatherer societies prevailed for the two million years of human history. These societies feature huge intergenerational resource flows, suggesting that these resource flows should replace fertility as the key demographic consideration. It is then theoretically expected that life expectancy and brain size would increase simultaneously, as apparently occurred during our evolutionary history. The brain here is considered as a direct form of bodily investment, but also crucially as facilitating further indirect investment by means of learning-by-doing.
狩猎采集的经济学一定推动了人类特征的生物进化，因为狩猎采集社会在人类历史的两百万年中占据主导地位。这些社会具有巨大的代际资源流动，这表明这些资源流动应该取代生育率成为关键的人口考虑因素。从理论上讲，人们预计预期寿命和大脑大小会同时增加，就像在我们的进化历史中显然发生的那样。这里的大脑被认为是身体投资的直接形式，但也是通过实践学习来促进进一步的间接投资的关键。
