Hunter-gatherers as models in public health

Horticulturalists and Hunter-Gatherers

Cooperative breeding in South American hunter-gatherers.

Evolutionary researchers have recently suggested that pre-modern human societies habitually practised cooperative breeding and that this feature helps explain human prosocial tendencies. Despite circumstantial evidence that post-reproductive females and extra-pair males both provide resources required for successful reproduction by mated pairs, no study has yet provided details about the flow o...

Gut microbiome of the Hadza hunter-gatherers

Human gut microbiota directly influences health and provides an extra means of adaptive potential to different lifestyles. To explore variation in gut microbiota and to understand how these bacteria may have co-evolved with humans, here we investigate the phylogenetic diversity and metabolite production of the gut microbiota from a community of human hunter-gatherers, the Hadza of Tanzania. We ...

Obesity, waist-hip ratio and hunter-gatherers.

Obesity is a rapidly growing global problem. It is not simply the result of eating too much, and not all types of obesity have the same significance. Obesity is in part genetic, and one particularly important genetic type of obesity is the tendency to 'truncal obesity',-that is, a raised waist-to-hip ratio. Such obesity is powerfully associated not only with a tendency to diabetes, but also to ...

Social learning among Congo Basin hunter-gatherers.

This paper explores childhood social learning among Aka and Bofi hunter-gatherers in Central Africa. Existing literature suggests that hunter-gatherer social learning is primarily vertical (parent-to-child) and that teaching is rare. We use behavioural observations, open-ended and semi-structured interviews, and informal and anecdotal observations to examine the modes (e.g. vertical versus hori...