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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 nevertheless falling within the mammalian range. Additionally, female reproductive skew is higher in polygynous human populations than in polygynous nonhumans mammals on average. This patterning of skew can be attributed in part to the prevalence of monogamy in humans compared to the predominance of polygyny in nonhuman mammals, to the limited degree of polygyny in the human societies that practice it, and to the importance of unequally held rival resources to women's fitness. The muted reproductive inequality observed in humans appears to be linked to several unusual characteristics of our species-including high levels of cooperation among males, high dependence on unequally held rival resources, complementarities between maternal and paternal investment, as well as social and legal institutions that enforce monogamous norms.

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' increases and declines of skill from approximately 23,000 hunting records generated by more than 1800 individuals at 40 locations. The data reveal an average age of peak productivity between 30 and 35 years of age, although 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 on heterogeneity in rates of decline than in rates of increase. This analysis sharpens questions about the coevolution of human life history and cultural adaptation.

In recent years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has sought to enforce home elevation policies more strictly across coastal Southeast Louisiana. These policies are meant to protect homes from flooding resulting from tropical storms. Such policies, however, are widely reviled by coastal community residents. This paper presents the results of ethnographic research conducted in Lower Plaquemines Parish investigating the reasons why coastal community residents hold such antipathy towards home elevation requirements. Above all, we find that there is enormous anxiety and deep resentment concerning the impacts of home elevation requirements. We show that such mandates are fundamentally at odds with vernacular architectural adaptations—especially the utilisation of trailers and other forms of modular housing—and they interfere with key features of residential mobility practices. Furthermore, many residents perceive FEMA home elevation policies as an element of a broader government conspiracy to depopulate the coast and drive out coastal community residents. We argue that the FEMA policies would be better informed and more effective based on a thorough ethnographic consideration of both the socioeconomic context of coastal communities and vernacular architectural strategies as they relate to issues of risk reduction and disaster recovery. Rather than forcing coastal communities into a one-size-fits-all risk reduction policy, we argue for a more flexible and locally informed approach building on existing cultural practices, social systems, and inherited knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With apologies, an incorrect author list was given in the article. An additional author, Chris von Rueden, (Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond) also contributed to this work. Author Ryan Schacht's affiliation was out-of-date. His correct affiliation is: Department of Anthropology, East Carolina University.

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 this polygyny paradox, we generalize the standard polygyny threshold model to a mutual mate choice model predicting the fraction of women married polygynously. We then demonstrate two conditions that are jointly sufficient to make monogamy the predominant marriage form, even in highly unequal societies. We assess if these conditions are satisfied using individual-level data from 29 human populations. Our analysis shows that with the shift to stratified agricultural economies: (i) the population frequency of relatively poor individuals increased, increasing wealth inequality, but decreasing the frequency of individuals with sufficient wealth to secure polygynous marriage, and (ii) diminishing marginal fitness returns to additional wives prevent extremely wealthy men from obtaining as many wives as their relative wealth would otherwise predict. These conditions jointly lead to a high population-level frequency of monogamy.

Life history is an important framework for understanding many aspects of ontogeny and reproduction relative to fitness outcomes. Because growth is a key influence on the timing of reproductive maturity and age at first birth is a critical demographic variable predicting lifetime fertility, it raises questions about the synchrony of growth and reproductive strategies. Among the Pume, a group of South American foragers, young women give birth to their first child on average at age 15.5. Previous research showed that this early age at first birth maximizes surviving fertility under conditions of high infant mortality. In this study we evaluate Pume growth data to test the expectation that if early reproduction is advantageous, then girls should have a developmental trajectory that best prepares them for young childbearing. Analyses show that comparatively Pume girls invest in skeletal growth early, enter puberty having achieved a greater proportion of adult body size and grow at low velocities during adolescence. For early reproducers growing up in a food-limited environment, a precocious investment in growth is advantageous because juveniles have no chance of pregnancy and it occurs before the onset of the competing metabolic demands of final reproductive maturation and childbearing. Documenting growth patterns under preindustrial energetic and demographic conditions expands the range of developmental variation not otherwise captured by normative growth standards and contributes to research on human phenotypic plasticity in diverse environments. KEY WORDS life history; human growth; age at first birth; hunter-gatherers; South American Indians DOI 10.1002/ajpa.21139

An ethnoarchaeological study of Pume foragers of Venezuela, which aims to understand the foragers' subsistence practices and the improved methods for archaeological research on technology, is presented.