Kim Hill

Arizona State University | ASU · School of Human Evolution and Social Change

Long-term and broad-scale landscape perspectives on human foraging behavior may be simulated with a computational approach known as agent-based modelling. This chapter describes the PaleoscapeABM which simulates the aggregated effects of foraging, using optimal foraging theory logic, on a reconstructed habitat landscape set on the Cape South Coast...

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...

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...

The Palaeo-Agulhas Plain formed an important habitat exploited by Pleistocene hunter-gatherer populations during periods of lower sea level. This productive, grassy habitat would have supported numerous large-bodied ungulates accessible to a population of skilled hunters with the right hunting technology. It also provided a potentially rich locatio...

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...

Even a simple human foraging system has a large number of moving parts. Foragers require a complex decision making process to effectively exploit the spatially and temporally variable resources in an environment. Here we present an agent-based modelling framework, based in optimal foraging theory, for agent foragers to make mobility and foraging de...

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...

A basic tenet of the behavioural ecological approach to anthropology is that local ecology, the density and distribution of resources in time and space, determine optimal patterns of economic exploitation of resources. Those optimal foraging, mobility, and grouping patterns then constrain all other aspects of social behaviour, and interact with mat...

High-resolution imagery information. Here is the information for the recent high-resolution satellite imagery purchased from DigitalGlobe and used for heads-up digitization for each site (PAN = panchromatic, MS = multispectral). We compared the total cleared area with Global Forest Change areas using cumulative estimates over the previous 3 years w...

Leadership is an active area of research in both the biological and social sciences. This review provides a transdisciplinary synthesis of biological and social-science views of leadership from an evolutionary perspective, and examines patterns of leadership in a set of small-scale human and non-human mammalian societies. We review empirical and th...

To better understand the origins of modern humans, we are developing a paleoscape model that simulates the climatic conditions and distribution of natural resources available to humans during this critical stage of human evolution. Our geographic focus is the southern Cape region of South Africa, which was rich in natural resources for hunter-gathe...

There are about 50 isolated indigenous societies across lowland South America, with limited to no contact with the outside world. Despite displacements , epidemics, and hostile interactions with outsiders, such tribes still manage to survive. How can we ensure the well-being of humanity's last known isolated peoples under such enormous and mounting...

Paleoanthropologists (scientists studying human origins) universally recognize the evolutionary significance of ancient climates and environments for understanding human origins. Even those scientists working in recent phases of human evolution, when modern humans evolved, agree that hunter-gatherer adaptations are tied to the way that climate and...

We develop an agent-based model of foraging behavior based on ecological parameters of the environment and prey characteristics measured in the Mbaracayu Reserve Paraguay. We then compare estimated foraging behavior from our model to the ethnographically observed behavior of Ache hunter-gatherers who inhabit the region and show a close match for da...

The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system has a major role in the regulation of the immune response as it is involved in the defense against pathogens. Evidence for association with tuberculosis (TB) is more consistent for class II than for class I HLA genes. TB is important among indigenous peoples in South America, not only because of its historic...

Hypotheses on the benefits of the practice of partible paternity are tested using demographic data for Ache foragers of Paraguay. Partible paternity refers to the institution of multiple males considered to contribute to the conception of a single offspring. Analyses focus on patterns of primary and secondary co-fatherhood among men, genealogical r...

Objectives Cortisol levels exhibit a diurnal rhythm in healthy men, with peaks in the morning and troughs in the evening. Throughout age, however, this rhythm tends to flatten. This diurnal flattening has been demonstrated in a majority of industrialized populations, although the results have not been unanimous. Regardless, little attention has bee...

SETTING: Cytokines play an important role in anti-tuberculosis immune response, combined with antigen-presenting cells and lymphocytes. Immune response gene polymorphisms have been reported to be associated with tuberculosis (TB) susceptibility in some but not all studies.OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the association of immune response genes with suscepti...

Fissions of human communities are monumental occasions with consequences for cultural and genetic variation and divergence through time by means of serial founder effects. An ethnographic review shows that most human group fissions are fueled primarily by internal political conflict and secondarily by resource scarcity. As found for other social an...

Our species exhibits spectacular success due to cumulative culture. While cognitive evolution of social learning mechanisms may be partially responsible for adaptive human culture, features of early human social structure may also play a role by increasing the number potential models from which to learn innovations. We present interview data on int...

Social norms that regulate reproductive and marital decisions generate impressive cross-cultural variation in the prevalence of kin marriages. In some societies, marriages among kin are the norm and this inbreeding creates intensive kinship networks concentrated within communities. In others, especially forager societies, most marriages are between...

Native American populations generally have a higher prevalence of infectious diseases than non-Native populations and this fact can induce different pressures in their immune system. We investigated the patterns of population differentiation (FST ) of 32 polymorphisms related to adaptive immune response in four Native American populations (Aché, Gu...

The current study assessed the heritability of personality in a traditional natural-fertility population, the Ache of eastern Paraguay. Self-reports (n = 110) and other-reports (n = 66) on the commonly used Big Five Personality Inventory (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness) were collected. Self-reports did n...

Postmarital residence patterns in traditional human societies figure prominently in models of hominid social evolution with arguments for patrilocal human bands similar in structure to female-dispersal systems in other African apes. However, considerable flexibility in hunter-gatherer cultures has led to their characterization as primarily multiloc...

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...

What is the biological explanation for menopause, and for female survival beyond it? A study suggests that competition for help in ancestral societies may have been key to the evolution of this unusual human trait.

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...

The universality of marriage in human societies around the world suggests a deep evolutionary history of institutionalized pair-bonding that stems back at least to early modern humans. However, marriage practices vary considerably from culture to culture, ranging from strict prescriptions and arranged marriages in some societies to mostly unregulat...

Contemporary humans exhibit spectacular biological success derived from cumulative culture and cooperation. The origins of these traits may be related to our ancestral group structure. Because humans lived as foragers for 95% of our species' history, we analyzed co-residence patterns among 32 present-day foraging societies (total n = 5067 individua...

Arising from M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita & E. O. Wilson 466, 1057-1062 (2010); Nowak et al. reply. Nowak et al. argue that inclusive fitness theory has been of little value in explaining the natural world, and that it has led to negligible progress in explaining the evolution of eusociality. However, we believe that their arguments are based upon a...

Partible paternity, the conception belief that more than one man can contribute to the formation of a fetus, is common in lowland South America and characterized by nonexclusive mating relationships and various institutionalized forms of recognition and investment by multiple cofathers. Previous work has emphasized the fitness benefits for women wh...

We report an integrated analysis of nuclear (autosomal, X- and Y-chromosome) short tandem repeat (STR) data and mtDNA D-loop sequences obtained in the same set of 22 Native populations from across the Americas. A north to south gradient of decreasing population diversity was observed, in agreement with a settlement of the Americas from the extreme...

Here I discuss how studies on animal social learning may help us understand human culture. It is an evolutionary truism that complex biological adaptations always evolve from less complex but related adaptations, but occasionally evolutionary transitions lead to major biological changes whose end products are difficult to anticipate. Language-based...

We report quantitative estimates of intergenerational transmission and population-wide inequality for wealth measures in a set of hunter-gatherer populations. Wealth is defined broadly as factors that contribute to individual or household well-being, ranging from embodied forms such as weight and hunting success to material forms such household goo...

Testosterone levels exhibit a circadian rhythm in healthy men, with morning levels tending to be higher compared to evening titers. However, circadian rhythms wane with age. Although this has been described in males living within industrialized settings, age-related changes have not received similar attention in populations outside these contexts....

Most genetic studies on the origins of Native Americans have examined data from mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA. To complement these studies and to broaden our understanding of the origin of Native American populations, we present an analysis of 1,873 X-chromosomes representing Native American (n = 438) and other continental populations (n = 1,435). We...

Origins of Egalitarianism Wealthy contemporary societies exhibit varying extents of economic inequality, with the Nordic countries being relatively egalitarian, whereas there is a much larger gap between top and bottom in the United States. Borgerhoff Mulder et al. (p. 682 ; see the Perspective by Acemoglu and Robinson ) build a bare-bones model de...

Although scientists are aware that humans share the same biological heritage as do all other organisms on the planet, the reliance of Homo sapiens on culture and cooperation has resulted in what can best be described as “a spectacular evolutionary anomaly.”1:11 The extra-somatic adaptations, technological dominance, and success of our species in co...

Evolutionary researchers have recently suggested that pre-modern human societies habitually practised cooperative breeding and that this feature helps explain human prosocial tendencies. Despite circumstantial evidence that post-reproductive females and extra-pair males both provide resources required for successful reproduction by mated pairs, no...

Do the population relationships obtained using DNA or blood group plus protein markers remain the same or do they reveal different patterns, indicating that the factors which influence genetic variation at these two levels of analysis are diverse? Can these markers shed light on the biological classification of the Aché, a Paraguayan tribe which on...

Numerous articles examine the relationship between men's hunting skill and other important biological and social traits. We analyzed more than 14,000 hunter days during 27 years of monitoring the Ache of Paraguay by using resampling methods to demonstrate that large sample sizes are generally required in order to distinguish individual men by hunti...

The role of men in hunter-gatherer societies has been subject to vigorous debate over the past 15 years. The proposal that men hunt wild game as a form of status signaling or "showing off" to provide reproductive benefits to the hunter challenges the traditional view that men hunt to provision their families. Two broad assumptions underlie the sign...

A firm link between small size at birth and later more centralized fat patterning has been established in previous research. Relationships between shortened interbirth intervals and small size at birth suggest that maternal energetic prioritization may be an important, but unexplored determinant of offspring fat patterning. Potential adaptive advan...

Seventeen genetic studies performed among the until recently hunter-gatherer Aché were reviewed and the corresponding data integrated to general information about this group, and to statistical tests of hypothesis concerning its origin(s). Two features of the Aché gene pool emerge: (a) the distinctiveness in relation to the general pattern of Ameri...

Cooperation among relatives is often regarded as evidence of kin selection. Yet altruism not requiring shared genes can also evolve among relatives. If characteristics of relatives (such as proximity, familiarity, or trust) make kin preferred social partners, the primary causes of nepotistic biases may reside principally in direct fitness payoffs f...

The large and diverse population of Latin America is potentially a powerful resource for elucidating the genetic basis of complex traits through admixture mapping. However, no genome-wide characterization of admixture across Latin America has yet been attempted. Here, we report an analysis of admixture in thirteen Mestizo populations (i.e. in regio...

Mean ancestry proportions, variance (var.) and standard errors (s.e.) for individuals from thirteen Mestizo populations estimated with Native Americans subdivided according to linguistic affiliation. (0.03 MB XLS)

Mean ancestry proportions, variance (var.) and standard errors (s.e.) for individuals from thirteen Mestizo populations estimated with each Native American population considered individually. (0.05 MB XLS)

Introduction Although physiological and behavioral responses are often reported in animals with high worm burdens, or helminthes,1* the adaptive signicance of these responses is unknown.3,4 Similarly, although the eld of biomedicine and medical anthropology is replete with publications on the short-term physiological and health effects of helminthe...

We examined genetic diversity and population structure in the American landmass using 678 autosomal microsatellite markers genotyped in 422 individuals representing 24 Native American populations sampled from North, Central, and South America. These data were analyzed jointly with similar data available in 54 other indigenous populations worldwide,...

Heterozygosity and Least-Cost Paths in a Pacific Coastal Migration Scenario The figure design follows that of Figure 4, with part B based on the scenario with 1:2 Pacific coastal/inland cost ratio. (644 KB PDF)

Heterozygosity and Least-Cost Paths in Five Migration Scenarios The figure design follows that of Figure 4A. (1.1 MB PDF)

Neighbor-Joining Tree of Native American Populations Based on Reynolds Genetic Distance The figure design follows that of Figure 8. (481 KB PDF)

Frequency Distribution Across Markers of the Fraction of Populations Whose p-Values for a Test of Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium Were Below 0.05 (538 KB PDF)

Allele Sharing for Within-Population Pairs of Individuals from Each of Five Populations: Ache, Arhuaco, Aymara, Cabecar, and Chipewyan Parent/offspring (PO), full sib (FS), and second-degree (2nd) relative pairs are indicated on the graphs. (1.0 MB PDF)

G Test Statistics for Agreement of Calibrated Allele Sizes in Two Population Comparisons (1.3 MB PDF)

Allele Sharing for Within-Population Pairs of Individuals from Each of Five Populations: Cree, Embera, Guarani, Guaymi, and Huilliche Parent/offspring (PO), full sib (FS), and second-degree (2nd) relative pairs are indicated on the graphs. (959 KB PDF)

Allele Sharing for Within-Population Pairs of Individuals from Each of Five Populations: Mixtec, Ojibwa, Quechua, Ticuna (Arara), and Ticuna (Tarapaca) Parent/offspring (PO), full sib (FS), and second-degree (2nd) relative pairs are indicated on the graphs. (1.0 MB PDF)

Heterozygosity in Relation to Geography for the Reduced Dataset of 1,306 Individuals The figure design follows that of Figure 3. Denoting heterozygosity by H and geographic distance in thousands of kilometers by D, the regression line for the graph is H = 0.7668 − 0.00624D, with correlation coefficient −0.867. Across the Americas, the correlation b...

The Mean and Standard Error Across 678 Loci of the Number of Private Alleles as a Function of the Number of Sampled Chromosomes, for the Reduced Dataset of 1,306 Individuals The figure design follows that of Figure 9, with the results based on 1,306 individuals superimposed using thin lines on the results obtained with all 1,484 individuals. (514 K...

Heterozygosity and Least-Cost Paths in a Coastal Migration Scenario, with Ache, Guarani, and Kaingang Excluded from the Analysis The figure design follows that of Figure 4, with part B based on the scenario with 1:10 coastal/inland cost ratio. (635 KB PDF)

p-Value for the Goodness-of-Fit Test of the Hypothesis that Private Allele Sizes Match the Expectation, as a Function of the Minimum Frequency of Private Alleles Considered (213 KB PDF)

Gzipped File with the Genotypes for 1,484 Individuals at 678 Loci (2.1 MB GZ).

Neighbor-Joining Tree of Native American Populations Based on Chord Genetic Distance The figure design follows that of Figure 8. (462 KB PDF)

Allele Sharing for Pairs of Individuals from Different Populations The four points farthest to the left all involve pairs in which one individual is Kogi 2463 and the other is from the Arhuaco population. (412 KB PDF)

Allele Sharing for Within-Population Pairs of Individuals from Each of Five Populations: Tundra Nentsi, Waunana, Wayuu, Zapotec, and Zenu Parent/offspring (PO), full sib (FS), and second-degree (2nd) relative pairs are indicated on the graphs. (1.0 MB PDF)

Cumulative Probability Distribution of the 4,950 Pairwise Symmetric Similarity Coefficients among 100 Runs of STRUCTURE with Given Values of K The cutoff SSC = 0.9 is marked by a vertical line. (173 KB PDF)

Heterozygosity of Individual Populations in the Reduced Dataset of 1,306 Individuals versus Heterozygosity in the Full Dataset of 1,484 Individuals The 25 newly examined populations are marked in red, and the previously genotyped populations are marked in yellow. (173 KB PDF)

Languages of the Native American Populations Included in This Study, Classified According to Greenberg [34] and Ruhlen [35] (16 KB PDF)

Discretized Matrix of Linguistic Distances between Stocks, Based on the Dice Index (14 KB PDF)

Discretized Matrix of Linguistic Distances for Pairs of Populations, with Stock Distances Based on the Dice Index (45 KB PDF)

Inferred Relative Pairs within Populations (Part II) (14 KB PDF)

Allele Sharing for Within-Population Pairs of Individuals from Each of Five Populations: Inga, Kaingang, Kaqchikel, Kogi, and Mixe Parent/offspring (PO), full sib (FS), and second-degree (2nd) relative pairs are indicated on the graphs. (969 KB PDF)

The Mean and Standard Error Across 678 Loci of the Number of Distinct Alleles as a Function of the Number of Sampled Chromosomes, for the Reduced Dataset of 1,306 Individuals The figure design follows that of Figure 2, with the results based on 1,306 individuals superimposed using thin lines on the results obtained with all 1,484 individuals. (530...