Duncan Stibbard Hawkes

Durham University | DU · Department of Anthropology

The measurement of hunting ability has been central to several debates about the goals of men's hunting among the Hadza and other hunter-gatherer populations. Hunting ability has previously been measured indirectly, by weighing the amount of food individuals bring back to camp over an extended period, their central place hunting return rate, and by...

It has been argued that men's hunting in many forager groups is not, primarily, a means of family provisioning but is a costly way of signaling otherwise cryptic qualities related to hunting ability. Much literature concerning the signaling value of hunting draws links to Zahavi's handicap principle and the costly signaling literature in zoology. H...

Objectives: The incentives underlying men's hunting acquisition patterns among foragers are much debated. Some argue that hunters preferentially channel foods to their households, others maintain that foods are widely redistributed. Debates have focused on the redistribution of foods brought to camp, though the proper interpretation of results is...

Over the last half century, anthropologists have vigorously debated the adaptive motivations underlying food acquisition choices and food-sharing among hunter-gatherer groups. Numerous explanations have been proposed to account for high-levels of generosity in food-sharing, including self- and family-provisioning, reciprocity, tolerated theft and p...

Humans’ willingness to bear costs to benefit others is an evolutionary puzzle. Cultural group selection proposes a possible answer to this puzzle—cooperative norms and institutions proliferate due to group-level benefits. For instance, belief in knowledgeable, moralizing deities is theorized to decrease selfishness and favoritism through threat of...

Hadza food-sharing is extremely generous and often extends to individuals outside the household. Some anthropologists have proposed that individuals, especially men, share food beyond the household in order to signal foraging skill. While correlational data have been used to both evidence and critique this hypothesis, it has less often been experim...

Objectives Myopia rates are increasing globally. This epidemic is linked to increased school participation, decreased outdoor activity and the proliferation of near-work occupations. The Tanzanian Hadza have traditionally subsisted as hunter-gatherers. School participation has historically been low and near-work otherwise minimal. Previous studies...

Many contemporary and ethnographically recorded hunter-gatherer populations appear to be, in the words of James Woodburn (1982; p.434), ‘egalitarian societies’. Among human populations and among group living mammals more broadly, such egalitarianism is unusual and, some have argued, requires special explanation. Several authors, including Woodburn...

The ratio of index- and ring-finger lengths (2D:4D ratio) is thought to be related to prenatal androgen exposure, and in many, though not all, populations, men have a lower average digit ratio than do women. In many studies an inverse relationship has been observed, among both men and women, between 2D:4D ratio and measures of athletic ability. It...