Charles Hilton

• Grinnell College

Background and aim We provide ethnographic, photovoice, and psychosocial stress data (food and water insecurity, potentially traumatic events, stress biomarkers) documenting the joys, hazards, and stressors of adolescents engaging in climate-sensitive pastoralist livelihoods in a global climate change hot spot. We aim to holistically capture socio-...

The goal of this study is to examine the association between in utero drought exposure and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) in a global climate change hot spot. Calculations of EAA in adults using DNA methylation have been found to accurately predict chronic disease and longevity. However, fewer studies have examined EAA in children, and drought e...

Pastoralists in East Africa are among the world's most vulnerable communities to climate change, already living near their upper thermal limits and engaging in a climate-sensitive livelihood in a climate change global hot spot. Pregnant women and children are even more at risk. Here, we report the findings of a study characterizing Samburu pastoral...

Objectives This study of Samburu pastoralists (Kenya) employs a same‐sex sibling design to test the hypothesis that exposure in utero to severe drought and maternal psychosocial stress negatively influence children's growth and adiposity. As a comparison, we also hypothesized that regional climate contrasts would influence children's growth and adi...

Recently, strong pleas have emerged to place the health of adolescents on the global health agenda. To reposition adolescence front and center, scholars argue that we must work toward a richly contextualized approach that considers the role that social environments play in shaping the final stages of growth and development. We aim to contribute to...

We present results from a collaborative project on the consequences of endemic violence in the pastoralist zone of Northern Kenya. Drawing on our ethnographically driven epidemiological approach, we examine the differential cost of violence by examining household nutrition. The case/control approach we employ draws data from six sites that are cult...

This paper discusses a Samburu pastoralist landscape idiom, ntoror, that encapsulates ideas about agentive pastoralist landscapes that inherently attract conflict; and passionate, place-based identities forged out of environmental and human-wrought disaster. The paper grows out of a project that experimentally integrated ethnographic self-scrutiny...

Recent decades have witnessed a growth in approaches to research and writing across anthropology's four fields that emphasize the need to respect alternative narratives and constructions of history, and to engage with anthropology's 'publics'. These developments have generated more ethically responsible research and more inclusive writing practices...

We examine cultural understandings and practices surrounding suicide in Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana pastoralists in north-central Kenya-three geographically overlapping and mutually interacting pastoralist communities. We collected our data in the context of a study of poverty, violence, and distress. In all three communities, stigma associated wit...

The work effort of prehistoric males relative to females has long been of interest to anthropologists, particularly in foraging versus farming groups. This knowledge requires a clear understanding of the sexual division of labor, or the dichotomy in subsistence roles allocated to males and females. Such research in the Prehispanic American Southwes...

Given the well-documented fact that human body proportions covary with climate (presumably due to the action of selection), one would expect that the Ipiutak and Tigara Inuit samples from Point Hope, Alaska, would be characterized by an extremely cold-adapted body shape. Comparison of the Point Hope Inuit samples to a large (n > 900) sample of Euro...

Violent conflict represents the third most important source of mortality around the world, yet violence-related mortality remains profoundly undercounted (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002). As a step toward documenting the consequences of even the "smallest wars" we offer a conceptual framework for a recently initiated project that compar...

The anthropological literature generally describes forager women as less mobile than men because of their child-care responsibilities and the energetic costs of reproduction. Examination of resource transport among the savanna Pume of southwestern Venezuela reveals, in contrast, that for certain food resources travel distances and resource weights...

Functional-morphological analyses related to fossil and contemporary hominin locomotion are the focus of this volume. As locomotion is considered a key element in the overall behavior of living primates, allowing them to fulfill such basic needs as avoiding predators, foraging for food, and finding mates, biological anthropologists have generally a...

The inspiration for this volume of contributed papers stemmed from conversations between the editors in front of Chuck Hilton's poster on the determinants of hominid walking speed, presented at thel998 meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA). Earlier at those meetings, Jeff Meldrum (with Roshna Wunderlich) had presen...

The disarticulated and commingled human remains of at least 13 individuals were recovered from an archaeological site during salvage operations for a natural gas pipeline project near Ram Mesa in northwestern New Mexico. The condition of the remains and the nature of their interment suggested that unusual circumstances surrounded their deposition....

Enhancing our understanding of the skeletal biology of modern hunter-gatherers and developing more sophisticated models of fossil and prehistoric hominin locomotor behavior and subsistence activities requires information on male and female forager mobility patterns. Unlike other primates, modern human foragers expend considerable energy in activiti...

Recent examination of the Shanidar 3 remains revealed the presence of anomalous bilateral arthroses in the lumbar region. This paper describes this developmental anomaly, as well as several degenerative changes and offers potential etiologies. The Shanidar 3 remains represent an adult male Neandertal, approximately 35-50 years of age, dating to the...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New Mexico, 1997. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 244-266).

Neandertal proximal pedal phalanges have been described as short relative to foot length with relatively wide diaphyses, the latter purportedly to resist elevated levels of mediolateral loading during locomotion. Analysis of proximal pedal phalanges from samples of Neandertals, early modern humans, and recent small-scale and industrial society huma...