Hunter-Gatherer Territoriality: The Perspective from Australia

Hunter-gatherer social complexity at Roonka Flat, South Australia

Supposing Hunter-gatherer Variability

J B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, once mused, "my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose ,but queerer than we can suppose" (Haldane 1927:286). This comment can be paraphrased to summarize the fundamental problem presently facing hunter-gatherer studies: there is more variation among recent and especially past hunter-gatherer societies than we have supposed. Th...

Teaching in hunter–gatherer infancy

A debate exists as to whether teaching is part of human nature and central to understanding culture or whether it is a recent invention of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic cultures. Some social-cultural anthropologists and cultural psychologists indicate teaching is rare in small-scale cultures while cognitive psychologists and evolutionary biologists indicate it is universal and...

Hunter-Gatherer Olfaction Is Special

People struggle to name odors [1-4]. This has been attributed to a diminution of olfaction in trade-off to vision [5-10]. This presumption has been challenged recently by data from the hunter-gatherer Jahai who, unlike English speakers, find odors as easy to name as colors [4]. Is the superior olfactory performance among the Jahai because of their ecology (tropical rainforest), their language f...

Hunter-gatherer Studies: the Importance of Context

Anthropological and behavioral ecological studies of living hunter-gatherers have flourished since the 1960’s. Researchers have developed and followed a variety of paradigms, each with its own assumptions and objectives, based on the behavior of huntergatherer communities. I argue here that in order to evaluate the validity of the use of a specific hunter-gatherer group for particular paradigma...