Environmental changes have had an enormous impact on prehistoric hunter-gatherers as they affect the biotic landscape and availability of resources such as freshwater, edible plants, game and fish. To assess whether various innovations that took place in hunter-gatherer communities during the Boreal may be attributed to changes in the vegetation, a...
Published in Frontiers in Earth Science
Mainland Southeast Asia experienced a long, sustained period of foraging economy before rice and millet farming spread into this area prior to 4,000 years BP. Although hundreds of individuals from dense cemeteries are found in several hunter-gatherer sites in Guangxi, Southern China, and Northern Vietnam, dating from the early to middle Holocene (c...
The evolutionary history of African hunter-gatherers holds key insights into modern human diversity. Here, we combine ethnographic and genetic data on Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHG) to show that their current distribution and density are explained by ecology rather than by a displacement to marginal habitats due to recent farming expansion...
Published in Current opinion in psychology
For most of our species' history, humans have lived in relatively small subsistence communities, often called small-scale societies. While these groups lack centralized institutions, they can and often do maintain large-scale cooperation. Here, we explore several mechanisms promoting cooperation in small-scale societies, including (a) the developme...
We review palaeoenvironmental proxies and combinations of these relevant for understanding hunter-gatherer niche construction activities in pre-agricultural Europe. Our approach consists of two steps: (1) identify the possible range of hunter-gatherer impacts on landscapes based on ethnographic studies; (2) evaluate proxies possibly reflecting thes...
Published in PeerJ
Pregnancy is the most delicate stage of human life history as well as a common target of food taboos across cultures. Despite puzzling evidence that many pregnant women across the world reduce their intake of nutritious foods to accomplish cultural norms, no study has provided statistical analysis of cross-cultural variation in food taboos during p...
Published in Agriculture & Food Security
BackgroundFood insecurity is a widespread public health concern in many communities of sub-Saharan Africa. This study involved the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, the only ethnic group in the country that has traditionally subsisted on hunting and gathering. In recent years, however, these communities have adopted mixed foraging economies. Info...
Balma del Gai site is a small rock shelter situated in the municipality of Moià (Barcelona, Spain) at an altitude of 760 m above sea level and 50 km from the current coastline. The levels of occupation in this context are dated between 13,442 cal BP and 9,552 cal BP, being related to the so-denominated “Epimagdalenian” and “Microlaminar Sauveter...
Published in Journal of human evolution
The invention of projectile technology had important ramifications for hominin evolution. However, the number of stone points that could have been used as projectiles fluctuates in archaeological assemblages, making it difficult to define when projectile technology was first widely adopted and how its usage changed over time. Here we use an agent-b...
Published in Journal of the mechanical behavior of biomedical materials
Calcaneus fractures are scarcely reported in archaeological assemblages worldwide. The main goal of this paper is to present a study case related to a calcaneus fracture and a set of bone lesions recorded in an adult individual dated in the Middle Holocene (ca. 6000-3000 years BP). This individual was part of a hunter-gatherer society that inhabite...
