Elsevier

Physiology & Behavior

Volume 193, Part B, 1 September 2018, Pages 196-204
Physiology & Behavior

The cooperative economy of food: Implications for human life history and physiology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2018.03.029Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Traits distinguishing the human diet include diverse, high quality, nutrient dense foods that require processing and technological complexity.

  • These traits underlie the dependence on others to meet caloric needs through cooperation, food sharing, labor exchange and the division of labor.

  • Cooperation was a critical driving force in physiological and life history evolution, highlighted are sexual dimorphism in body fat and the pace of growth.

Abstract

The human diet has undergone substantial modifications since the emergence of modern humans and varies considerably in today's traditional societies. Despite these changes and cross-cultural differences, the human diet can be characterized by several common elements. These include diverse, high quality foods, technological complexity to acquire and process food, and the establishment of home bases for storage, processing and consumption. Together these aspects of the human diet challenge any one individual to independently meet all of his or her daily caloric needs. Humans solve this challenge through food sharing, labor exchange and the division of labor. The cooperative nature of the human diet is associated with many downstream effects on our life history and physiology. This paper overviews the constellation of traits that likely led to a cooperative economy of food, and draws on ethnographic examples to illustrate its effects on human life history and physiology. Two detailed examples using body composition, time allocation and food acquisition data show how cooperation among Savanna Pumé hunter-gatherers affects activity levels, sexual dimorphism in body fat, maturational pace and age at first birth.

Introduction

The idea that who we are today is the outcome of a long evolutionary history is well established in the fields of evolutionary medicine and medical anthropology. This approach takes the view that many present-day ailments and disabilities (e.g. obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, impacted wisdom teeth and dental carries) arise because current lifestyles are incompatible with the selective pressures that shaped our bodies and behavior during human evolution [[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]]. This perspective in particular has stressed the mismatch between our current diets and past hunting and gathering diets to which we are metabolically adapted [8]. My aim here is to highlight a somewhat different aspect of our evolutionary legacy by focusing less on the food we eat, than how we get that food. Although human nutritional ecology has undergone substantial changes, notably from dependence on hunting and gathering to domesticated plants and animals, cooperation, sharing and exchange are ubiquitous across subsistence strategies. The fundamentally cooperative nature of the human diet differs markedly from that of our closest primate relatives. To discuss the cooperative economy of food, I first outline traits that distinguish the human diet and propose that the complex of nutrient-rich and diverse foods, resource exploitation across large geographic areas, and dependence on technologically assisted food processing together impose a time constraint for any one person to be self-sufficient. I then discuss how this constraint is resolved through cooperation and pooled energy budgets, and illustrate its implications for human life history and physiology through two detailed examples from my research with hunter-gatherers. Examples are drawn from traditional societies, in particular hunter-gatherers, and comparisons with other primates as a way to appreciate what is unusual about how humans meet their daily caloric needs. Although attention is paid to traditional societies and nonhuman comparisons, many features of the human diet and how we procure food are universal and pertain to our lives today.

This overview builds on participation in the IBRC Symposium “The Pace of Life and Feeding” at Purdue University, which incorporated perspectives on food and feeding from many different disciplines and professions. In keeping with the goals of the conference, this overview is intended to be broadly accessible, focusing on important themes and general patterns in the human diet.

Section snippets

Traits that distinguish the human diet

The human diet has undergone considerable modifications since the emergence of Homo sapiens approximately 300,000 years ago. For as long as humans can be identified in the archaeological record they have been adopting new foods, and incorporating novel technologies and strategies to procure food. Prior to the Holocene ~11,000 years ago, all humans made their living exclusively by foraging for wild resources. With domestication, some hunter-gatherers transitioned to agriculture and pastoralism,

The cooperative economy of food and pooled energy budgets

Across human societies, men and women, adults and children do different food procurement and processing tasks, target different resources and share food. While role specialization is not unique to humans, the combination of cooperation across age, sex and tasks is unmatched in other animals. In some biparental bird and insect species, male and female parents specialize in specific offspring care tasks (raptors are a good example of sex-based specialization [67,68]). In some animals, males and

Conclusion

Much of our success as a species derives from our ability to access a diverse, high quality diet. While meat often is the focus of discussions about human dietary uniqueness [48,49,[162], [163], [164]], tubers and other calorically dense foods also feature in evolutionary arguments about dietary shifts, expansion into novel environments, food sharing and the division of labor [[165], [166], [167], [168]]. No doubt high-quality food has been a critical driving force in human evolution. However,

Acknowledgments

I thank Drs. Richard Mattes and Amanda Veile for inviting me to present an earlier version of this paper at the IBRC Symposium on “The Pace of Life and Feeding: Health Implications” at Purdue University. I am foremost grateful to the Savanna Pumé of Doro Aná, Yagurí and Charakotó, and to Dr. Russell D Greaves who collected much of the Savanna Pumé data. Many thanks to Oskar Burger and Amanda Veile for their assistance in the data collection. I am grateful to Alan Achenbach who conducted the

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