
Abigail E PageBrunel University London · Department of Psychology
Abigail E Page
PhD in Biological Anthropology
About
73
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Introduction
I have been trained as a biological anthropologist, completing my PhD in UCL on cooperative childrearing, health and reproduction in a hunter-gatherer population called the Agta. Since my PhD, I have become increasingly interested in social support and its consequences for maternal-child health .
I am currently working to bring together evolutionary, psychology, public health and demographic research on social support and maternal and child outcomes.
Additional affiliations
August 2018 - June 2023
March 2016 - September 2016
October 2016 - August 2018
Education
September 2012 - July 2016
September 2010 - September 2011
October 2006 - June 2010
Publications
Publications (73)
It has long been acknowledged that women with children require social support to promote their health and wellbeing, as well as that of their children. However, the dominant conceptualizations of support have been heavily influenced by Western family norms. The consequence, at best, has been to stifle our understanding of the nature and consequence...
Non-maternal carers (allomothers) are hypothesized to lighten the mother's workload, allowing for the specialized human life history including relatively short interbirth intervals and multiple dependent offspring. Here, using in-depth observational data on childcare provided to 78 Agta children (a foraging population in the northern Philippines; a...
Women cooperate over multiple domains and while research from western contexts portrays women's networks as limited in size and breadth, women receive help, particularly with childcare, from a diverse range of individuals (allomothers). Nonetheless, little exploration has occurred into why we see such diversity. Wide maternal childcare networks may...
Background and objectives
There is significant evidence from large-scale, industrial and post-industrial societies that greater income and wealth inequality is negatively associated with both population health and increasing health inequalities. However, whether such relationships are inevitable and should be expected to impact the health of small-...
While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities—incorporating market integration—are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found con...
Women who care for multiple highly dependent children require significant support from non-maternal caregivers (allomothers). Theoretically, grandmothers are seen as key allomothers due to low costs and high inclusive fitness returns. Empirically, however, the evidence is inconsistent and the reasons for this variation are not well-understood. Unde...
A family is a network of individuals tied to each other by blood, marriage, adoption or fostering and comes in many forms and sizes. There is no singular or universal type of family. Some common family types or structures include a single parent and children, a ‘nuclear’ family comprising two parents and children, or extended families consisting of...
If we take a cross-cultural view of human societies, there are few institutions or systems which can be argued to be ‘universal’. Marriage may be the exception. It is found in virtually all societies, and likely has a deep evolutionary history (Shenk, 2024). However, this universality only holds if we define marriage extremely loosely, as the socia...
Despite agreement that humans have evolved to be unusually fat primates, adipose patterning among hunter–gatherers has received little empirical consideration. Here we consider the development of adiposity among four contemporary groups of hunter–gatherers, the Aka, Savanna Pumé, Ju’/Hoansi and Agta using multi-level generalized additive mixed mode...
Breastfeeding rates in the UK have remained stubbornly low despite long-term intervention efforts. Social support is a key, theoretically grounded intervention target in both cases, yet they have a weak evidence base. Understanding of the dynamics between infant feeding, maternal wellbeing and social support is currently limited by retrospective co...
We discuss gendered division of labour in nuclear households as a bargaining problem, where male and female partners bargain over labour inputs and resulting leisure time. We hypothesize that outside options - an individual’s fallback options for welfare outside their household, such as kin support - affects this bargaining process, providing those...
Among vertebrates, allomothering (non-maternal care) is classified as cooperative breeding (help from sexually mature non-breeders, usually close relatives) or communal breeding (shared care between multiple breeders who are not necessarily related). Humans have been described with both labels, most frequently as cooperative breeders. However, few...
To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while neverth...
Examining development is essential for a full understanding of behaviour, including how individuals acquire traits and how adaptive evolutionary forces shape these processes. The present study explores the development of cooperative behaviour among the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population. A simple resource allocation game assessing both lev...
Humans exhibit a broad range of post-marital residence patterns and there is growing recognition that post-marital residence predicts women's reproductive success; however, the nature of the relationship is probably dependent on whether co-resident kin are cooperators or competitors. Here, we explore this relationship in a Tibetan population, where...
Background
Shorter breastfeeding duration is associated with detrimental consequences for infant health/development and maternal health. Previous studies suggest social support is essential in maintaining breast/chest-feeding and helping to improve general infant feeding experiences. Public health bodies therefore work to support breastfeeding in t...
Success in marriage markets has lasting impacts on women's wellbeing. By arranging marriages, parents exert financial and social powers to influence spouse characteristics and ensure optimal marriages. While arranging marriages is a major focus of parental investment, marriage decisions are also a source of conflict between parents and daughters in...
There is significant evidence from large-scale, industrial and post-industrial societies that greater inequality in income and wealth are negatively associated with both population health across multiple domains and increasing health inequalities. However, in high-income Western societies, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of wealth dispar...
Background: Social support in all forms is essential in maintaining breast/chest-feeding and helping to improve general infant feeding experience among parents. With breastfeeding durations notably short in the UK, the question of the effectiveness and quality of support for infant feeding comes to the fore. Current literature suggests that togethe...
Human parents require significant support to raise multiple, highly dependent offspring. Grandmothers are often highlighted as key allomothers (non-maternal caregivers) and their presence is frequently associated with increased child survivorship, leading some to describe humans as cooperative breeders. Equally well documented is the diversity of h...
Examining development is essential for a full understanding of behaviour, including how individuals acquire traits and how adaptive evolutionary forces shape these processes. The present study explores cooperative development among the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population. A simple resource allocation game assessing both levels of cooperatio...
Worldwide mothers receive help with childcare from a diverse range of individuals (allomothers). Nonetheless, little exploration has occurred into why we see such diversity, such as different strategies used to buffer risk. Wide maternal childcare networks may be a consequence of situations of little material wealth and food storage - as is common...
Theoretical models relating to the evolution of human behaviour usually make assumptions about the kinship structure of social groups. Since humans were hunter-gatherers for most of our evolutionary history, data on the composition of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups has long been used to inform these models. Although several papers have taken a...
Objectives
Physical breastfeeding problems can lead women to terminate breastfeeding earlier than planned. In high-income countries such as the UK, breastfeeding problems have been attributed to the cultural and individual “inexperience” of breastfeeding, ultimately leading to lower breastfeeding rates. Yet, cross-cultural evidence suggests breastf...
Social support is a known determinant of breastfeeding behaviour and is generally considered beneficial. However, social support encompasses a myriad of different supportive acts, providing scope for diverse infant feeding outcomes. Given the vulnerability of postpartum mental health, this paper aims to explore both how support prolongs breastfeedi...
Social support is a known determinant of breastfeeding behaviour and is generally considered beneficial. However, social support encompasses a myriad of different supportive acts, providing scope for diverse consequences. Given the vulnerability of postpartum mental health, it is crucial to understand not only how support prolongs breastfeeding, bu...
Objectives: Physical breastfeeding problems can lead women to terminate breastfeeding earlier than planned. In high-income countries, breastfeeding problems have been attributed to the cultural and individual “inexperience” of breastfeeding, ultimately leading to lower breastfeeding rates. Yet, cross-cultural evidence suggests breastfeeding problem...
Local physical and social environmental factors are important drivers of human health and behaviour. Environmental perception has been linked with both reproduction and parenting, but links between subjective environmental experiences and breastfeeding remain unclear. Using retrospective data from an online survey of UK mothers of children aged 0–2...
Demography is central to biological, behavioral, and cultural evolution. Knowledge of the demography of prehistoric populations of both Homo sapiens and earlier members of the genus Homo is, therefore, key to the study of human evolution. Unfortunately , demographic processes (fertility, mortality, migration) leave little mark on the archeological...
We welcome the comments by Harpur and Haddon (2020) on our paper on the typologies of social support and its associations with breastfeeding at two months in a UK sample. We share their concerns around the under-acknowledged costs of breastfeeding, and the need for a truly family-centred approach to breastfeeding support. However, they are mistaken...
Although multilevel sociality is a universal feature of human social organization, its functional relevance remains unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of multilevel sociality on cumulative cultural evolution by using wireless sensing technology to map inter-and intraband social networks among Agta hunter-gatherers. By simulating the accumula...
There is extensive evidence to suggest that social support improves breastfeeding outcomes. Building on this evidence-base, public health services and interventions aiming to improve breastfeeding rates have primarily targeted informational and emotional support to mothers, reflecting an individual behaviour-change approach. However, mothers exist...
Human children are frequently cared for by non-parental caregivers (alloparents), yet few studies have conducted systematic alternative hypothesis tests of why alloparents help. Here we explore whether predictions from kin selection, reciprocity, learning-to-mother and costly signalling hypotheses explain non-parental childcare among Agta hunter-ga...
Non-maternal caregivers (allomothers) are hypothesised to lighten the mother’s workload, producing human’s specialised life history where multiple dependent offspring are produced over a relatively short time period. Here, using in-depth observational data on who for cares for 78 Agta children (aged 0-6 years, a foraging population in northern Phil...
Caregiving by nonparental caregivers, who provide direct and/or indirect investments to a child
Extensive evidence suggests that social support improves breastfeeding outcomes. Building on this evidence-base, public health services and interventions with aims to improve breastfeeding rates have focused on providing informational and emotional support to mothers. However, mothers presumably exist within a wider social network, and the characte...
A long-standing hypothesis suggests that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture results in people working harder, spending more time engaged in subsistence activities and having less leisure time1,2. However, tests of this hypothesis are obscured by comparing between populations that vary in ecology and social organization, as wel...
Mother and infant health have long been under a spotlight, with an array of institutions and agencies targeting the mother-child unit to improve population outcomes. However, mothers and their children do not exist in a vacuum, and other actors provide mothers with essential support. Indeed, the discourse on mother-child health increasingly acknowl...
Male-biased sex ratios have been observed in multiple small-scale societies. Although intentional and systematic female-biased mortality has been posited as an explanation, there is often a lack of ethnographic evidence of systematic female neglect and/or infanticide. The Agta, a foraging population from the Philippines, have a skewed sex ratio of...
Male-biased sex ratios have been observed in multiple small-scale societies. Although intentional and systematic female-biased mortality has been posited as an explanation, there is often a lack of ethnographic evidence of systematic female neglect and/or infanticide. The Agta, a foraging population from the Philippines, have a skewed sex ratio of...
Who helped you develop into the person you are today? Most of us may think about a parent or parents, but many of us would also recognise the important role of other people. Perhaps it’s a teacher, a grandparent, or a neighbourhood friend. The fact that we are supported by many people in our childhood is, in fact, very unusual: In non-human mammals...
Despite much theorizing, the evolutionary reasons why humans cooperate extensively with unrelated individuals are still largely unknown. While reciprocity explains many instances of non-kin cooperation, much remains to be understood. A recent suite of models based upon ‘cooperative assortativity’ suggest that non-kin cooperation can evolve if indiv...
Many hunter-gatherer groups live on the outskirts of wider society, experiencing poor health outcomes with little access to medical care. From a development perspective, key interventions include the sedentarisation of these mobile peoples into camps nearby larger towns with sanitation infrastructure and medical care, as increased access to service...
Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling. Here we explore the impact of storyt...
Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling. Here we explore the impact of storyt...
Significance
Understanding demographic and evolutionary processes shaping human life history diversity depends on precise age estimations. Inferring age is a challenge in small-scale societies, and especially in those societies that do not follow a calendar year. Our method opens possibilities in demographic and life history studies allowing cross-...
Individuals’ centrality in their social network (who they and their social ties are connected to) has been associated with fertility, longevity, disease and information transmission in a range of taxa. Here, we present the first exploration in humans of the relationship between reproductive success and different measures of network centrality of 39...
Social networks in modern societies are highly structured, usually involving frequent contact with a small number of unrelated ‘friends’ 1 . However, contact network structures in traditional small-scale societies, especially hunter-gatherers, are poorly characterized. We developed a portable wireless sensing technology (motes) to study within-camp...
Time is finite and no organism can avoid the allocation dilemma that this necessarily entails. A quintessential trade-off is that between parental investment and reproduction, otherwise known as the quality-quantity trade-off. However, humans may be exceptional among apes given our high quantity production of high quality offspring. This success ha...
Humans possess the unique ability for cumulative culture [1, 2]. It has been argued that hunter-gatherer's complex social structure [3-9] has facilitated the evolution of cumulative culture by allowing information exchange among large pools of individuals [10-13]. However, empirical evidence for the interaction between social structure and cultural...
Many defining human characteristics including theory of mind, culture and language relate to our sociality, and facilitate the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships. Therefore, deciphering the context in which our sociality evolved is invaluable in understanding what makes us unique as a species. Much work has emphasised group-leve...
Like many other mammalian and primate societies [1–4], humans are said to live in multilevel social groups, with individuals situated in a series of hierarchically structured sub-groups [5, 6]. Although this multilevel social organization has been described among contemporary hunter-gatherers [5], questions remain as to the benefits that individual...
Humans regularly cooperate with non-kin, which has been theorized to require reciprocity between repeatedly interacting and trusting individuals. However, the role of repeated interactions has not previously been demonstrated in explaining real-world patterns of hunter–gatherer cooperation. Here we explore cooperation among the Agta, a population o...
File 1: Supplementary Material Section 1: Study Population Section 2: Game Rationale and Data Collection Section 3: Camp Stability Measure Section 4: Statistical Analyses Section 5: Camp Stability and Foraging Return Rates Tables S1–S7 Figures S1 & S2
Poster presentation at AAPA 2016 symposium ’Biocultural Perspectives of Family Health’
The Neolithic demographic transition remains a paradox, because
it is associated with both higher rates of population growth and
increased morbidity and mortality rates. Here we reconcile the
conflicting evidence by proposing that the spread of agriculture
involved a life history quality–quantity trade-off whereby mothers
traded offspring survival...
Are interactions with unrelated and even unknown individuals a by-product of modern life in megacities? Here we argue instead that social ties among non-kin are a crucial human adaptation. By deploying a new portable wireless sensing technology (motes), we mapped social networks in Agta and BaYaka hunter-gatherers in unprecedented detail. We show t...
Presentation about the relationship between sedentism and helminthic burden in modern day foragers.
The social organization of mobile hunter-gatherers has several derived features, including low within-camp relatedness and fluid meta-groups. Although these features have been proposed to have provided the selective context for the evolution of human hypercooperation and cumulative culture, how such a distinctive social system may have emerged rema...
The occurrence of polygynous marriage in hunter–gatherer societies, which do not accumulate wealth, remains largely unexplored since resource availability is dependent on male hunting capacity and limited by the lack of storage. Hunter–gatherer societies offer the greatest insight in to human evolution since they represent the majority of our speci...