John Ziker

Boise State University | BSU · Department of Anthropology

Plain Language Summary This paper represents a synthesis of conceptual analyses, case study analyses, and practical thoughts on the application of convergence science in Arctic change studies. During a virtual workshop in 2020, a diverse, multi‐national team of authors consisting of social scientists, engineers, earth system scientists, and ecologi...

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...

Background Enacting STEM education reform is a complex task and there are a variety of approaches that might be selected by change agents. When working on an institutional change project to impact multiple parts of the STEM education system, teams of change agents may select multiple strategies and tactics to enact at one time and over multiple yea...

At the headwaters of the Yenisei River in Tuva and northern Mongolia, nomadic pastoralists move between camps in a seasonal rotation that facilitates their animals' access to high-quality grasses and shelter. The use and informal ownership of these camps depending on season helps illustrate evolutionary and ecological principles underlying variatio...

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...

Instructional reform in STEM aims for the widespread adoption of evidence based instructional practices (EBIPS), practices that implement active learning. Research recognizes that faculty social networks regarding discussion or advice about teaching may matter to such efforts. But teaching is not the only priority for university faculty – meeting r...

1. Camera trap arrays can generate thousands to millions of images that require exorbitant time and effort to classify and annotate by trained observers. Computer vision has evolved as an automated alternative to manual classification. The most popular computer vision solution is the supervised Machine Learning technique, which uses labeled images...

Background Change strategies may leverage interpersonal relationships and conversations to spread teaching innovations among science faculty. Knowledge sharing refers to the process by which individuals transfer information and thereby spread innovative ideas within an organization. We use knowledge sharing as a lens for identifying factors that en...

Background Many institutional and departmentally focused change efforts have sought to improve teaching in STEM through the promotion of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs). Even with these efforts, EBIPs have not become the predominant mode of teaching in many STEM departments. To better understand institutional change efforts and the b...

Programs seeking to transform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses often strive for participating faculty to share their knowledge of innovative teaching practices with other faculty in their home departments. Here, we provide interview, survey, and social network analyses revealing that faculty who use innovative...

Suicidality is an important contributor to disease burden worldwide. We examine the developmental and environmental correlates of reported suicidal ideation at age 15 and develop a new evolutionary model of suicidality based on life history trade-offs and hypothesized accompanying modulations of cognition. Data were derived from the National Longit...

Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters...

Background Calls for science education reform have been made for decades in the USA. The recent call to produce one million new science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates over 10 years highlights the need to employ evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) in undergraduate STEM classes to create engaging and effective learning...

Early life factors are associated with the timing of reproductive events in adolescence, but a variety of hypotheses (such as psychosocial acceleration theory, paternal investment theory, extrinsic mortality, internal prediction, and intergenerational conflict) propose different explanations for why this may occur. To compare between these theories...

Persistent interest lies in gender inequality, especially with regard to the favouring of sons over daughters. Economists are concerned with how privilege is transmitted across generations, and anthropologists have long studied sex-biased inheritance norms. There has, however, been no focused cross-cultural investigation of how parent–offspring cor...

Human adaptation depends upon the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning will benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring...

Subsistence food sharing in Ust’-Avam (Taimyr Region, Russian Federation) is analyzed in light of Arctic research on sharing and current debate. Cultural traditions such as food sharing practices are widespread across indigenous communities in the Arctic and are arguably fundamental to the sustainability of indigenous Arctic cultures and their abil...

Monogamy appears to have become the predominant human mating system with the emergence of highly unequal agricultural populations that replaced relatively egalitarian horticultural populations, challenging the conventional idea-based on the polygyny threshold model-that polygyny should be positively associated with wealth inequality. To address thi...

The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. A social food-sharing network within the Ust’-Avam community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia is analyzed for underlying patterns of resilience and key evolutionarily stable strat...

Philanthropic giving is a classic example of prosociality. Important for funding charitable and not-for-profit organizations, research on philanthropic giving is particularly relevant as competition for donors has increased in recent years. This chapter investigates the influence of social cues on philanthropic solicitation using one-shot anonymous...

In the face of economic and political changes following the end of the Soviet Union, total fertility rates fell significantly across the post-Soviet world. In this study we examine the dramatic fertility transition in one community in which the total fertility rate fell from approximately five children per woman before 1993 to just over one child p...

Variability in men’s reproductive success (RS) is partly attributable to the ability of successful men to influence resource flows relevant to the mate choice and reproduction of women. This study explores the effects of variability in resource flows on men’s RS in an indigenous foraging/mixed-economy community in northern Siberia where monogamous...

The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. Using a methodology inspired from a community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia, a network of post-procurement food distributions is explored to describe underlying patterns of sta...

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Diet aims to provide a survey of both the diversity of human diet in the past as well as providing solid information on the many approaches to the topic. Thus the aim was not just to present what we know, but how we gain that understanding. The first section presents research on the diets of non-human prima...

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Diet aims to provide a survey of both the diversity of human diet in the past as well as providing solid information on the many approaches to the topic. Thus the aim was not just to present what we know, but how we gain that understanding. The first section presents research on the diets of non-human prima...

This article examines altruistic social norms among the Dolgans and the Nganasans in Arctic Siberia, drawing on and integrating experimental game theory and semiotic approaches. The article demonstrates the complementarity of these two methodologies in order to more fully understand how sharing is promoted over individual self-aggrandizement in a c...

Available at: https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/ensminger/13521-13_CH13_4thPgs.pdf

We agree with the comments by van Hoorn (1) on our critique (2): testing causal hypotheses about human behavior is a challenge (1, 3). Making progress requires specifying alternative hypotheses and then testing these hypotheses using diverse and converging lines of evidence. We have defended the hypothesis that social norms, which culturally coevol...

This paper discusses flexibility in subsistence and exchange strategies and family and community structures in an indigenous community on the lower Enisei River in north-central Siberia. An analysis of available data on mobility, resource use, and social and economic exchanges contributes to understanding the factors that affect resilience of indig...

Lamba and Mace's critique (1) of our research (2–4) is based on incorrect claims about our experiments and several misunderstandings of the theory underpinning our efforts. Their findings are consistent with our previous work and lead to no unique conclusions. Lambda and Mace (1) incorrectly claimed that we “mostly” sampled from single communitie...

Histories from the North turns research in the Arctic and sub-Arctic on its head by focusing on the perceptions of the environment, movements, and narratives of the inhabitants of the Circumpolar North. The North has been inhabited for millennia. One of the goals of the BOREAS program was to create dialogue between local inhabitants and scientific...

Our Research Article does not argue that elements of an evolved social psychology are unimportant, as Baumard et al. suggest. Nor do we believe, as Delton et al. propose, that purely genetically evolved mechanisms, rooted in kinship and reciprocity, are sufficient to account for the massive expansion of cooperation in the past 10 millennia and the...

Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and i...

In this paper, we attempt to shed light on a probable cause of cultural change via a new avenue of approach. In brief, the paper represents a micro-study that addresses the Ahrensburgian culture group during the close of the Late Palaeolithic in north central Europe, and its relationship to the Hensbacka group found in central Bohuslän on the coast...

•Evolutionary Anthropology and Religion

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Alexei Yurchak. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 331 pp.

Traditional foraging activities and extensive food sharing are critical to the contemporary nutritional well-being of Dolgan and Nganasan people in the Taimyr Region, Russia. Despite recent economic transformations geared toward free-market capitalism in the post-socialist era, since 1991, a native communal resource-management regime has developed....

Continuities in social, economic, and religious organisation of the formerly nomadic Dolgan and Nganasan in northern Russia are described, along with the process by which key values and norms are perpetuated. Kinship, communal property concepts, and delayed reciprocity are integral to local resource allocation and resource management. Benefits of s...

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in in...

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in t...

Empirical data on food sharing in native Dolgan, Nganasan, and Nenets communities in Siberia provide evidence for hunter control over big game and fish, as well as likely benefits of inter-household sharing. Most food sharing occurs with kin and, thus, kin-selection-based nepotism cannot be ruled out. Reciprocal interhousehold sharing at meals occu...

This paper describes an indigenous hunting/fishing/trapping economy in the Taimyr Autonomous Region, northern Russia, and traces the continuities and developments in property since the collapse of the Soviet command economy in 1991. Indigenous relations to hunting grounds and renewable resources are discussed with ethnographic case material from Do...

economy in Russia. Information was collected to characterize, compare, and contrast two types of households - those that maintained use-rights to state enterprise lands and those that claimed family/clan holdings. Family/clan holdings came about in response to calls for selfdetermination by indigenous political leaders oR the national level.i) In t...

This article is an inquiry into the extent to which, and how, roles of men and women in indigenous communities in north-central Siberia have changed along with the changing economic and political context from the 1917 Communist Revolution to the post-Soviet era. The starting point for this investigation is archived data from the 1926/27 Polar Censu...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998.

Ust-Avam is an indigenous community of 500 individuals north of the Arctic Circle on the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia (Russia). The collapse of the USSR in the 1990's significantly altered economic organization in Taimyr. In Ust-Avam the majority of working-aged adults were laid off their jobs in 1993. From 1993 to 1997, I documented decreased ferti...

This presentation explores the extent to which relations between men and women in Northern communities in Russia have changed from pre-Soviet to post-Soviet time periods. A related question has to do with historical changes in kinship and family structures and how these affect male/female relationships. I begin with information gleaned from the 192...

Empirical data on food procurement and distribution combined with socio-demographic information on givers and recipients in a community of indigenous Siberians are used to test hypotheses of non-market food transfers derived from evolutionary theory, including: kinship, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. The frequency...

1 video tape (VHS, PAL, 30 min.)