Targeting the Hunting Hypothesis: Review of Evidence From the Hadza

2025/05/06 by James F. O’Connell, Kristen Hawkes, Nicholas Blurton Jones · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Primate Behavior and Ecology

paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/evan.70002

openalex publication_date 2025/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

The hunting hypothesis holds that ancestral human males favored their own mates and children in sharing meat gained from big game hunting, a practice said to have led to the origin of nuclear families and related changes in life history. Data from East African Hadza hunter-gatherers operating in an environment like that prevalent when and where Homo evolved contradict key elements of this idea. An alternative model, the grandmother hypothesis, holds that senior women's foraging and food sharing led to life history changes that favored mate guarding, not paternal provisioning, in the formation of nuclear family-like social units. Relevant data and theory are reviewed and evaluated.

Citations

• The Food-sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominids
• A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity

Discussions

• "grandmother hypothesis holds that senior women's foraging and food sharing led to life history changes that favored mate guarding, not paternal provisioning, in the formation of nuclear family-like s [bsky, 4 points, 2 comments]

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