Consider going for a walk: where you need to go, how fast you need to move to get there, and whether you need to bring anything with you to carry the results of your work.
Are you going on this walk with someone else? Does walking with a friend change your preparation? Remember to bring an extra sweater or snack if you’re walking with a child? You probably did; because people intuitively change their plans based on their current needs and situation.
As an anthropologist, I focus my research on the human evolution of walking and running because I love the flexibility humans bring to these behaviors. In all kinds of environments across space and time, people vary how far they go, when they go, and what they go for (food, water, or friends) depending on numerous factors such as season, daylight, rituals, and family.
Anthropologists divide their studies of human activities into two broad categories: What people need to do (eat, keep their children alive, etc.) and what solutions they come up with to meet those needs.
How people keep their children alive is an important topic in my research because it has a direct impact on whether a population will survive. It turns out that children survive when they are with adults. For this purpose, it is a human universal that women carry heavy loads, including their children and food, every day. This needs-based behavior appears to be an important part of our evolutionary history and explains many aspects of human physiology and female morphology, such as the lower center of mass of women.
Solutions to other important problems, such as what food women should carry, vary depending on time and place. I think these differences are as complementary in explaining human biology and culture as the needs themselves.
Effects of uncommon activities
Evolutionary scientists often focus on how beneficial hereditary traits that provide survival advantages are passed on to offspring. Eventually, when a trait provides a useful solution, it may become more prevalent in the population.
For example, researchers have made big claims about how persistent hunting through endurance running has had an impact on the evolution of the human body. This theory suggests that catching prey by running until it is exhausted leads to humans’ ability to run long distances by increasing our ability to sweat, strengthening our head support, and ensuring our lower limbs are light and elastic.
But persistent hunting occurs in less than 2% of hunting cases recorded in a large ethnographic database, making it an extremely rare solution to the need to find food. Could such a rare and unusual form of movement have a powerful enough effect to select for the cluster of adaptive traits that make humans such excellent endurance athletes today?
Perhaps persistence hunting is actually a fallback strategy, providing solutions only at crucial moments when survival is at the limit. Or maybe these abilities are just side effects of intense walking every day. I think a better argument is that the ability to predict how to act between common and unfamiliar strategies is a driver of the human capacity for resilience.
The impact of daily life on evolution
Predation, especially of large mammals, is not very common, despite how often it is discussed. For example, anthropologists tend to generalize that until a hundred years ago, people living in the Arctic consumed only the flesh of animals hunted by humans. But in fact the original ethnographic study reveals a much more nuanced picture.
Women and children were actively involved in hunting, and this was a highly seasonal activity. Coastal fishing, berry picking, and use of plant materials were vital to the daily subsistence of Arctic people. Small family groups used canoes to forage along the coast for part of the year.
In other seasons, the entire community participated in hunting large mammals, driving them into dangerous situations where they could be killed more easily. Sometimes family groups were together, sometimes large communities were together. Sometimes women hunted with rifles, sometimes children chased reindeer.
The dynamic nature of daily life means that the activity of hunting relatively rare large land vertebrates is unlikely to be the essential behavior that would help humans solve basic problems such as keeping food, water and children alive.
Anthropologist Rebecca Bliege Bird has studied how predictable food is throughout the day and year. She noted that in most communities, big game is rarely caught, especially if one hunts alone. Even among the Hadza in Tanzania, generally considered a big game hunting community, a hunter averages 0.03 catch per day, or 11 animals per year for that individual.
Bird and others clearly argue that planning and flexible coordination by females is an important aspect of how humans survive in everyday life. It is women’s daily efforts that allow people to move spontaneously to perform high-risk activities (perpetual or otherwise) such as hunting several times a year. It is therefore the resilience of women that allows communities to survive among rare big game opportunities.
Changing roles and contributions
Some anthropologists suggest that behavior in some parts of the world varies less for environmental reasons, such as how much daylight there is in winter, and more for cultural reasons, such as what tools you make. The importance of culture means that solutions change more than needs.
One of the changing aspects of culture is the roles assigned to certain genders. Changing gender roles relate to the distribution of work and when people undertake certain solution-based tasks. In most cultures, these roles change throughout a woman’s life. In American culture, this is similar to a grandparent returning to college to develop a childhood passion to start a new business to send their grandchildren to college.
In many places, females move from juvenile stage, when they can carry their siblings and firewood, to early parenthood, when they can go hunting with a baby on their back, to older parentage, when they can carry water on their head and a baby on their back. from the tools they had in their hands to the postmenopausal period when they could carry huge loads of mangoes and firewood back to camp.
Although we carry loads all the time, our capacity to plan and modify our behavior according to different environments is part of what drives us. homo sapiens‘ success, which means that women’s behavior at different life stages is an important driver of this ability.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
Written by: Cara Wall-Scheffler, University of Washington.
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Cara Wall-Scheffler does not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic duties.