Our review of the import of the Man the Hunter conference and volume, which contrary to recent media coverage actually expressed diverse views on hunter-gatherers and inspired decades of research, is now published 🧪 #BioAnth
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
Figure from manuscript illustrating distributions of rates of aggression for each group by each species. It shows there's much overlap, but the most and least aggressive groups seems distinct. Caption from MS: Fig. 6. Posterior sample distributions for the group intercepts for aggression. (A) shows distribution for total aggression, and (B) shows distribution for contact aggression only. Black lines reflect a 95% CI.
What I find particularly striking is the within-species between-group variation in rates of observed aggression...
#BioAnth 🧪
doi.org/10.1126/scia...
A unique prediction of an evolutionary approach is that some puzzling aspects of psych & health are best explained by mismatches of modern environments to the ancestral one. Yet the utility of the mismatch concept has been questioned by @joshtybur.bsky.social & @danielnettle.bsky.social 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵
Basketball legend Michael Jordan dressed in a suit and holding a Nike Air Jordan athletic shoe
I've been using this image for years to illustrate prestige bias in my lecture on cultural evolution, assuming everyone would recognize him. This year I asked the class if they knew who this was, and the only student who did was the one black student. He was shocked that no one else did. 🧪 #BioAnth
Top panel: My plot of US adult female and male height distributions, which are much narrower, and overlap less than in the figure from Fuentes, which is in the bottom panel.
1. After I posted my critical review of @anthrofuentes.bsky.social Sex is a Spectrum, a colleague pointed out that his figure of adult heights by sex (bottom panel👇) can't be right: there aren't that many US adults shorter than 4' or taller than 7'
Turns out Fuentes' data are made up 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵
I suppose every biologist would write quite different essays on TSG. My take, for what it's worth, is that in TSG and followups, Dawkins aimed to introduce the public to the developments in evolutionary biology sparked by Hamilton, Williams, Maynard Smith and Price, Trivers, and other folks working that tradition, which has settled on “evolved strategy” as a core concept. This body of work, which today is generally referred to as behavioral ecology and evolutionary game theory, has the same goal as Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, and especially, The Descent of Man (i.e., sexual selection), but now using the understanding of heritable variation from the Modern Synthesis.
The Selfish Gene (TSG) was published 50 yrs ago. I was recently asked about Dawkins' concep of the selfish gene in light of my review many years ago of Burt & Trivers' book on selfish genetic elements: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Here is my response (lightly edited): 🧪 #BioAnth 1/14
Survivorship curves for females and males in hunter-gatherers vs. the United States. For hunter-gatherers, curves drop sharply for infants, and then show a steady decline with age, with most dead by 80 years. For the US, the curve is flat near 100% survivorship until age 50-60, after which it drops sharply, with most dead by 100 years
Science!
(And several high income countries outperform the US) #BioAnth 🧪
@evoroseman.bsky.social and Auerbach nail the fatal flaw in the ESS: organisms somehow adapt to completely novel situations without natural selection. It's basically Intelligent Design, imo, but with the organism as the intelligent designer instead of God 🧪 #BioAnth 1/2
ABSTRACT The extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) is a school of thought that maintains that genetic determination and natural selection are over-emphasized in the study of evolution at the expense of non-genetic inheritance and processes of evolution beyond selection. Its proponents call for the de-emphasis of genetics and the adoption of a broader model of inheritance that includes cultural and epigenetic transgenerational effects and strong adaptive phenotypic plasticity. Presenting itself as a radical alternative to what it claims is a rigid and ossified theoretical orthodoxy, the EES has lately gained considerable traction among scholars of human evolution, and a distinct sub-branch of the EES unique to the biological anthropological study of human evolution has emerged (the EES in human evolution). To date, however, no direct comparison between the EES in human evolution and other contemporary evolutionary approaches has been attempted to evaluate whether the EES in human evolution affords researchers an edge in articulating good questions and structuring research programs to answer them. After reviewing the landscape of evolutionary theory, we evaluate whether the EES in human evolution is capable of delivering the processually pluralistic vision of evolution it has long promised and whether it brings something that the decades-long ongoing synthesis (OS) of evolutionary theory since the modern synthesis does not. We then conduct a head-to-head comparison to evaluate the relative explanatory efficacy of the EES and our preferred OS theoretical framework on several issues of human morphological evolution. We demonstrate that evolutionary perspectives as drawn from the OS have a much more clarifying effect on the investigation of human evolution than their EES-based competitor. Far from being a radical extension of evolutionary thought, the EES in human evolution offers little more than another idiom in which to tell adaptationist stories and triumphalist narr…
A much-needed critique of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) as applied to human evolution, by @evoroseman.bsky.social and Ben Auerbach (2026).
Evolving a Field: Can Evolutionary Theory Provide What the Study of Human Evolution Requires? 🧪 #BioAnth
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Plot showing simulated energy balance (production - consumption) across the lifespan of a hunter-gatherer family. Left plot, which includes child food contributions shows simulated trajectories that dip below and then above 0. Right plot, which includes only food produced by the wife and husband, shows chronic energy deficits.
Inspired by the work of @lallailaria.bsky.social, @sheinalew.bsky.social, @jeremykoster.bsky.social & many others, I've simulated hunter-gather family energy balance across the lifespan. If kids contribute, families can (barely) maintain energy balance, but if they don't, it's impossible 🧪 #BioAnth
Paper 🚨 We found that LLMs can match or exceed human coders on theoretical variables assessing the form and function of ritual fasting. Guided by theory and ethical human oversight, LLMs can generate units of cultural analysis for cross‑cultural theoretical tests. #BioAnth doi.org/10.1098/rsos...
If you fancy nerdy social science, & evolutionary approaches to psychology & behavior irk, anger, or excite you, check out this podcast. Hosts David Pinsof & @dpietra.bsky.social are two of the sharpest thinkers in ev psych, & their guest this week @psmaldino.bsky.social is a rising star 🧪 #BioAnth
A plot from the wife's age at first birth to the end of her life showing the contributions to family energy production by her, the husband, and their children. Initially, with no children, all energy is produced by the couple. As children arrive and gain foraging skills, their total contribution to family energy production grows and then begins to decline at the age of menopause as they mature and leave the family. Mortality takes its toll as the parents age.
I was surprised by children's large contribution to family food production in my hunter-gatherer family simulation. Of course, they're eating most of this food, too! From this paper linking the evolution of menopause to family energy balance: menopause-preprint.wisp.place 🧪 #BioAnth
Hands tell a longer story of human growth than textbooks admit. New research shows metacarpal bones keep thickening well into late adolescence, reshaping how anthropologists define maturity. #BioAnth #HumanEvolution #Osteology www.anthropology.net/p/when-bones...
Humans have a unique relationship with fire. At least 800,000 years ago, if not 1 million years ago, human ancestors had control over fire. Regular use of fire is evident in the archaeological record by 500,000 years ago. Hominins certainly used fire for light, warmth, and protection from predators. Anthropologists think the controlled use of fire led to significant evolutionary outcomes, including cultural shifts as well as changes in the shape and function of the hominin body. Certainly, some of the major changes to human behavior and form resulted from cooking. Physical changes over time—to the gut, face, and brain, in particular—were influenced by the processing and ingestion of cooked foods. And researchers suggest that fire’s light may have even affected sleep-wake patterns and therefore hominins’ hormonally controlled body rhythms. Is the control of fire what sets hominins apart from wild animals? Are the burned bones and plants found at nearly 1-million-year-old sites a sign of the emergence of the domesticated hominin? When scientists consider the process of domesticating plants and animals, they think of artificial selection—for example, crossbreeding of plants, directed mating of animals, or culling—and the desired evolutionary outcomes of those activities. The regular, controlled use of fire by hominins has evolutionary consequences; could this behavior be an unconscious form of artificial selection of hominins by hominins—in other words, selection without wish or expectation of change that inevitably alters the population? What do you think? Are humans still wild?
Me, in 2016 @sapiens.org
www.sapiens.org/biology/huma...
#BioAnth #Fire
What is it? A 400,000-year-old open-air hearth buried in an old clay pit in England. It pushes back the timeline on fire-making by about 350,000 years. Why it matters: The question of how far back our ancestors made fire is intertwined with some of the biggest mysteries about human evolution.
🤔 #BioAnth
@politico.com regarding this WaPo story: www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...
The paper is open access. Click on the link for the full text
Still citing Trivers (1972) on parental investment? There's been a ton of empirical and theoretical work since then. Kokko and Jennions overheard a couple of goby fish chatting about some of the complexities 🧪 #BioAnth 🧵 1/2 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Lee: What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources. Table 6 Primary Subsistence Source by Latitude. The table shows that less than 50 degrees from the equator, most hunter-gatherer societies rely mainly on gathering plant foods.
Perhaps the most influential table in hunter-gatherer studies, published in Lee's chapter in the famous 1968 edited volume by Lee and DeVore titled, ironically, Man the Hunter 🧪 #BioAnth
I think this might be the first observed instance of lethal coalition aggression in bonobos, albeit within-group rather than between-group 🧪 #BioAnth
Check out Dr. Megan Brickley's chat with @craignorriscbc.bsky.social on CBC Kitchener-Waterloo this morning! She talked about ongoing work on the individuals from the public burial ground in Guelph.
#Anthropology #AnthroSky #Paleoanthropology #McMasterUniversity #Bioanth
Everything you wanted to know about adult sex ratios (ASR) but were afraid to ask 🧪 #bioanth: www.nature.com/articles/s42...
She’s the mastermind behind our #bioanth and #archaeology teaching labs, and instructor of all Forensic Anthropology courses. Beyond the classroom Dr. Calce consults on forensic cases and is a field bioarchaeologist.
Today we spotlight Dr. Stephanie Calce, UVic’s Bone Boss and our unstoppable Senior Lab Instructor.
@uvic.ca @uvicsocialsciences.bsky.social #anthropology #bioanth #archaeology
Help me name my new skull! Drop your suggestion in the comments 💀🖤
#skull #skulls #nameideas #livestreamclips #biologicalanthropology #bioanth #anthropologystudent #bioarchaeology #forensicanthropology
Great thread on the discovery that a rare mutation in FOXP2 disrupts language, with an appearance by Steve Pinker. Subsequent research showed that FOXP2, a transcription factor, is highly conserved, yet acquired 2 amino acid substitutions in the human lineage. 🧪 #BioAnth
This week's seminar Thurs 2nd Oct 4:15pm in Sydney Smith LT " #Atapuerca archaeological sites (Burgos, #Spain), from #Palaeolithic to 2025" from our own @michaelbones95.bsky.social All Welcome! #EdinArch #prehistory #bioanth #archaeology #Edinburgh #UNESCO #OneHealthArchaeo @iphes-cerca.bsky.social
