Human Behavioral Ecology

Abstract

Human behavioral ecology may be defined as the study of the evolutionary ecology of human behavior. Its central problem is to discover the ways in which the behavior of modern humans reflects our species' history of natural selection. During the last two decades this approach has grown rapidly, involving researchers from all the major branches of anthropology, as well as from other behavioral and social sciences and from the humanities. This article focuses on the growing body of empirical behavioral ecological re­ search on behavior in non-Western, primarily nonindustrial societies. Studies that have brought new insights to areas of traditional concern among an­ thropologists, such as population regulation, foraging, reciprocity, redistribu­ tion, kinship, marriage, descent, child care, and sociocultural change are emphasized . The evolutionary biological study of human behavior has been given many other names besides human behavioral ecology, including evolutionary ecolo­ gy, biosociology, biocultural science, biosocial science, human ethology, sociobiology, socioecology, evolutionary biological anthropology, and evolu­ tion and human behavior studies. Many researchers now avoid the con­ troversial term sociobiology because it is often wrongly equated with kin selection theory (93), which is actually just one aspect of the approach, and because they wish to distance themselves from popular and speculative works that use the label.