TY - JOUR T1 - The Life History Of Human Foraging: Cross-Cultural And Individual Variation JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/574483 SP - 574483 AU - Jeremy Koster AU - Richard Mcelreath AU - Kim Hill AU - Douglas Yu AU - Glenn Shepard, JR. AU - Nathalie Van Vliet AU - Michael Gurven AU - Hillard Kaplan AU - Benjamin Trumble AU - Rebecca Bliege Bird AU - Douglas Bird AU - Brian Codding AU - Lauren Coad AU - Luis Pacheco-Cobos AU - Bruce Winterhalder AU - Karen Lupo AU - Dave Schmitt AU - Paul Sillitoe AU - Margaret Franzen AU - Michael Alvard AU - Vivek Venkataraman AU - Thomas Kraft AU - Kirk Endicott AU - Stephen Beckerman AU - Stuart A. Marks AU - Thomas Headland AU - Margaretha Pangau-Adam AU - Anders Siren AU - Karen Kramer AU - Russell Greaves AU - Victoria Reyes-García AU - Maximilien Guèze AU - Romain Duda AU - Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares AU - Sandrine Gallois AU - Lucentezza Napitupulu AU - Roy Ellen AU - John Ziker AU - Martin R. Nielsen AU - Elspeth Ready AU - Christopher Healey AU - Cody Ross Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/12/574483.abstract N2 - 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 individual hunters’ of hunting skill gain and loss from approximately 23,000 hunting records generated by more than 1,800 individuals at 40 locations. The model provides an improved picture of ages of peak productivity as well as variation within and among ages. The data reveal an average age of peak productivity between 30 and 35 years of age, though high skill is maintained throughout much of adulthood. In addition, there is substantial variation both among individuals and sites. Within study sites, variation among individuals depends more upon heterogeneity in rates of decline than in rates of increase. This analysis sharpens questions about the co-evolution of human life history and cultural adaptation. It also demonstrates new statistical algorithms and models that expand the potential inferences drawn from detailed quantitative data collected in the field. ER -