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Household and Kin Provisioning by Hadza Men

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Abstract

We use data collected among Hadza hunter-gatherers between 2005 and 2009 to examine hypotheses about the causes and consequences of men’s foraging and food sharing. We find that Hadza men foraged for a range of food types, including fruit, honey, small animals, and large game. Large game were shared not like common goods, but in ways that significantly advantaged producers’ households. Food sharing and consumption data show that men channeled the foods they produced to their wives, children, and their consanguineal and affinal kin living in other households. On average, single men brought food to camp on 28% of days, married men without children at home on 31% of days, and married men with children at home on 42% of days. Married men brought fruit, the least widely shared resource, to camp significantly more often than single men. A model of the relationship between hunting success and household food consumption indicates that the best hunters provided 3–4 times the amount of food to their families than median or poor hunters. These new data fill important gaps in our knowledge of the subsistence economy of the Hadza and uphold predictions derived from the household and kin provisioning hypotheses. Key evidence and assumptions backing prior claims that Hadza hunting is largely a form of status competition were not replicated in our study. In light of this, family provisioning is a more viable explanation for why good hunters are preferred as husbands and have higher fertility than others.

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Notes

  1. On marital classifications: Men who were living with a spouse were classified as married, and otherwise, single. Although some men living alone might claim to be married, from a household provisioning standpoint, having a wife who is not co-resident is essentially equivalent to having no wife.

  2. On kinship: Using a more restrictive definition of kin, considering only individuals related by r > 0.125 to the food producer or his wife, corroborates this evidence for kin-biases in consumption (consanguineal vs. non-kin: χ2 = 106.0, p < 0.0005; affinal vs. non-kin: χ2 = 6.2, p = 0.01).

  3. On focal follows: Hawkes et al. (1991) report data derived from 45 follows conducted in 1985–1986 covering 75 hunter-days (average = 1.6 hunters per follow). In these follows, 14 small game animals were killed.

  4. On Hawkes et al. (2001a) sharing data: Case numbers 22, 23, 24, 30, 35, 37, 42, 44, 46, 47, 49, and 65 as reported in Hawkes et al. (2001a:138). In the remaining cases, some or all of the producer household shares were not reported.

  5. On selecting the max, the median, and the minimum hunters: Selecting the maximum-producing hunter in each camp is straightforward. Selecting the median hunter is straightforward in camps with an odd number of hunters. In camps with an even number, we first removed the best hunter from the sample and then identified the median hunter from among those men who remained. Since the distribution of hunting success among men is usually right-skewed (a few hunters with very high success), this is a better estimate of central tendency. Selecting the minimum hunter was a little tricky in two camps, where more than one man produced zero large game or small game. In these instances, we randomly selected one of the men.

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Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Harvard Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. We thank the Tanzanian Commission on Science and Technology for permission to conduct this research. We also thank Dr. Audax Mabulla, Chris Daborn, Claire Porter, Alyssa Crittenden, Johannes and Lena Kleppe, Daudi Peterson, Christian and Nani Schmelling, and Happy Msofe for their help in the field. We appreciate the readers who provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript, including Richard Wrangham, Karen Kramer, Douglas Bird, Rebecca Bliege Bird, Kristen Hawkes, James O’Connell, Jeremy Koster, and three anonymous reviewers. Our deepest gratitude is to the Hadza for their cooperation.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 10 Sachem Street, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA

    Brian M. Wood

  2. Division of Biological Anthropology, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

    Frank W. Marlowe

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Wood, B.M., Marlowe, F.W. Household and Kin Provisioning by Hadza Men. Hum Nat 24, 280–317 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-013-9173-0

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