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Cooperative breeding in South American hunter–gatherers
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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 study has yet provided details about the flow of food resources by different age and sex categories to breeders and offspring, nor documented the ratio of helpers to breeders. Here, we show in two hunter–gatherer societies of South America that each breeding pair with dependent offspring on average obtained help from approximately 1.3 non-reproductive adults. Young married males and unmarried males of all ages were the main food providers, accounting for 93–100% of all excess food production available to breeding pairs and their offspring. Thus, each breeding pair with dependants was provisioned on average by 0.8 adult male helpers. The data provide no support for the hypothesis that post-reproductive females are the main provisioners of younger reproductive-aged kin in hunter–gatherer societies. Demographic and food acquisition data show that most breeding pairs can expect food deficits owing to foraging luck, health disabilities and accumulating dependency ratio of offspring in middle age, and that extra-pair provisioning may be essential to the evolved human life history.
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“This pattern, in general, seems to characterize numerous traditional human societies in the ethnographic record (Gurven et al. 2000; Hill & Hurtado 2009; Sugiyama 2004; Sugiyama & Sugiyama 2003).”
From Parasite-stress promotes in-group assortative sociality: The cases of strong family ties and heightened religiosity (2012) · cites this paper as Hill & Hurtado 2009
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Metadata
- Authors
- Hill, K., & Hurtado, A. M.
- Affiliations
- Arizona State University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2009-08-19
- Volume
- 276
- Issue
- 1674
- Pages
- 3863-3870
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- PMC
- PMC2817285
- OpenAlex
- W2152926170
- Cited by
- 290
- References
- 62
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 32 · 2014: 23 · 2013: 17 · 2012: 17
- FWCI
- 21.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Animal Behavior and Reproduction
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Keywords
- cooperative breeding, hunter-gatherers, food provisioning, helpers at the nest, kinship, life history, dependency ratio, foraging, prosocial behavior, South American indigenous peoples
- MeSH terms
- Cooperative Behavior, Female, Food, Helping Behavior, Humans, Male, Reproduction, South America, Time Factors, Trees
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