Hunter-gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists

Biology Letters

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2014, Pages

  Colette Berbesque, J ^a   Marlowe, Frank W ^b   Shaw, Peter ^a   Thompson, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROEHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Food shortages; Foragers; Obesity; Palaeodiet

Indexed keywords

ADAPTATION; AGRICULTURAL PRACTICE; ANCESTRY; DIABETES; EPIDEMIC; FOOD LIMITATION; GENOTYPE; HABITAT QUALITY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; HUNTER-GATHERER; OBESITY; SUBSISTENCE; DIET; FAMINE; FOOD AVAILABILITY; HYPOTHESIS TESTING;

AGRICULTURE; ARTICLE; FEEDING BEHAVIOR; FOOD SHORTAGES; FORAGERS; HUMAN; OBESITY; PALAEODIET; STARVATION;

FOOD SHORTAGES; FORAGERS; OBESITY; PALAEODIET;

AGRICULTURE; FEEDING BEHAVIOR; HUMANS; OBESITY; STARVATION;

EID: 84906536443     PISSN: 17449561     EISSN: 1744957X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0853     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Diamond J. 2003 The double puzzle of diabetes. Nature 423, 599-602. (doi:10.1038/423599a) (Pubitemid 36713209)
2. Chakravarthy MV, Booth FW. 2004 Eating, exercise, and 'thrifty' genotypes: connecting the dots toward an evolutionary understanding of modern chronic diseases. J. Appl. Physiol. 96, 3-10. (doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00757. 2003) (Pubitemid 38035170)
3. Kuzawa CW. 2010 Beyond feast-famine: brain evolution, human life history, and the metabolic syndrome. In Evolutionary anthropology (ed. M Muehlenbein), pp. 518-527. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
4. Cosmides L, Tooby J. 1994 Better than rational: evolutionary psychology and the invisible hand. Am. Econ. Rev. 84, 327-332.
5. Neel JV. 1962 Diabetes mellitus: a 'thrifty' genotype rendered detrimental by 'progress'? Am. J. Hum. Genet. 14, 353-362.
6. Speakman JR. 2013 Evolutionary perspectives on the obesity epidemic: adaptive, maladaptive, and neutral viewpoints. Annu. Rev. Nutr. 33, 289-317. (doi:10.1146/annurev-nutr-071811-150711)
7. Castetter EF, Bell WH. 1942 Pima and Papago Indian agriculture. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
8. Clark JT, Michlovic MG. 1996 An early settlement in the Polynesian homeland: excavations at'Aoa Valley, Tutuila Island, American Samoa. J. Field Archaeol. 23, 151-167. (doi:10.2307/530501)
9. Ross EB. 1978 Food taboos, diet, and hunting strategy: the adaptation to animals in Amazon cultural ecology. Curr. Anthropol. 19, 1-36. (doi:10.1086/201999)
10. Sisson M. 2012 The primal blueprint: reprogramme your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health and boundless energy. London, UK: Vermilion.
11. Wolf R, Cordain L. 2010 The paleo solution: the original human diet. Las Vegas, NV: Victory Belt Publishing.
12. Wilmsen EN. 1989 Land filled with flies: a political economy of the Kalahari. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
13. Bigelow R. 1975 The role of competition and cooperation in human evolution. In War, it's causes and correlates (eds MA Nettleship, RD Givens, A Nettleship), pp. 235-261. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton.
14. Bogin B. 2011 Kung nutritional status and the original 'affluent society': a new analysis. J. Biol. Clinic. Anthrop. 68, 349-366.
15. Binford LR. 2001 Constructing frames of reference. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
16. Kelly RL. 1995 The foraging spectrum. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
17. Kerr JT, Ostrovsky M. 2003 From space to species: ecological applications for remote sensing. Trends Ecol. Evol. 18, 299-305. (doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(03) 00071-5) (Pubitemid 36631750)
18. Porter CC, Marlowe FW. 2007 How marginal are forager habitatš J. Archaeol. Sci. 34, 59-68. (doi:10.1016/j.jas.2006.03.014) (Pubitemid 44490194)
19. Dirks R. 1993 Starvation and famine: cross-cultural codes and some hypothesis tests. Cross Cultur. Res. 27, 28-69. (doi:10.1177/106939719302700103)
20. Benyshek DC, Watson JT. 2006 Exploring the thrifty genotype's food-shortage assumptions: a crosscultural comparison of ethnographic accounts of food security among foraging and agricultural societies. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 131, 120-126. (doi:10.1002/ajpa.20334) (Pubitemid 44267108)
21. Murdock GP, White DR. 1980 Standard cross-cultural sample. In Cross-cultural samples and codes (eds H Barry, A Schlegel), pp. 3-43. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
22. Rohner D, Berg DS, Rohner EC. 1982 Data quality control in the standard cross-cultural sample: crosscultural codes. Ethnology 21, 359-369. (doi:10. 2307/3773766)
23. Binford LR. 1980 Willow smoke and dogs' tails: hunter-gatherer settlement systems and archaeological site formation. Am. Antiquity 45, 4-20. (doi:10.2307/279653)
24. Turner DP et al. 2006 Evaluation of MODIS NPP and GPP products across multiple biomes. Remote Sens. Environ. 102, 282-292. (doi:10.1016/j.rse. 2006.02.017) (Pubitemid 43776709)
25. Running SW, Nemani RR, Heinsch FA, Zhao MS, Reeves M, Hashimoto H. 2004 A continuous satellite-derived measure of global terrestrial primary production. Bioscience 54, 547-560. (doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2004)054[0547:ACSMOG] 2.0.CO;2) (Pubitemid 38751840)
26. Prentice AM, Hennig BJ, Fulford AJ. 2008 Evolutionary origins of the obesity epidemic: natural selection of thrifty genes or genetic drift following predation release? Int. J. Obes. 32, 1607-1610. (doi:10.1038/ijo.2008.147)
27. Ziker J, Schnegg M. 2005 Food sharing at meals: kinship, reciprocity, and clustering in the Tamiyr Autonomous Okrug, Northern Russia. Hum. Nat. 16, 178-210. (doi:10.1007/s12110-005-1003-6)
28. Speth JD, Spielmann KA. 1983 Energy source, protein metabolism, and hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 2, 1-31. (doi:10.1016/0278-4165(83)90006-5)
29. Pavlov P, Svendsen J, Indrelid S. 2001 Human presence in the European Arctic nearly 40,000 years ago. Nature 413, 64-67. (doi:10.1038/35092552) (Pubitemid 32843487)
30. Woodburn J. 1980 Hunters and gatherers today and reconstruction of the past. In Soviet and western anthropology (ed. E Gellner), pp. 95-11 7. London, UK: Duckworth.