Human life histories: primate trade-offs, grandmothering socioecology, and the fossil record

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Publication Type Journal Article
School or College College of Social & Behavioral Science
Department Anthropology
Creator Hawkes, Kristen
Other Author O'Connell, J. F.; Jones, Nicholas G. Blurton
Title Human life histories: primate trade-offs, grandmothering socioecology, and the fossil record
Date 2003
Description Human life histories differ from those of other animals in several striking ways. Recently Smith and Tompkins (1995, p. 258) highlighted the combination of "slow" and "fast" features of human lives. Our period of juvenile dependency is unusually long, our age at first reproduction is late, and we have the maximum life span of the terrestrial animals. Yet we wean babies relatively early, and we space births closely. We also have (midlife) menopause. Smith and Tompkins predicted that the evolution of our life cycles would be explained by a combination of developments in life history theory with increasingly sophisticated techniques for extracting information from the fossil record. Their prudent guess was that "no new sunburst theory-in which all human characteristics are drawn from one adaptive shift is - likely" to emerge (1995, p. 274).
Type Text
Publisher University of Chicago Press
First Page 204
Last Page 227
Subject Meat; Maturity; Life Span
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Hawkes, K., O'Connell, J. F., Jones, N. G. B. (2003). Human life histories: primate trade-offs, grandmothering socioecology, and the fossil record, in Primate life histories & socioecology edited by Kappeler, P. M., & Pereira, M. E. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 204-27.
Rights Management (c) University of Chicago Press http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 16,367,360 bytes
Identifier ir-main,4195
ARK ark:/87278/s6kw60j6
Setname ir_uspace
ID 705869
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6kw60j6
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