ArticleScience advances2022
Foraging complexity and the evolution of childhood.
Article in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Menopause Averted a Midlife Energetic Crisis With Help From Older Dependent Children and Parents: A Simulation Study.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Article
- Stay social, stay young: a bioanthropological outlook on the processes linking sociality and ageing.GeroScience · 2025Review
- Patterns of physical activity in hunter-gatherer children compared with US and UK children.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The effect of target scarcity on visual foraging.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Research on re-searching: interrupted foraging is not disrupted foraging.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Foraging and the importance of knowledge in Pemba, Tanzania: implications for childhood evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Socio-economic predictors of Inuit hunting choices and their implications for climate change adaptation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women's contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts.PloS one · 2023Article
- Girls in early childhood increase food returns of nursing women during subsistence activities of the BaYaka in the Republic of Congo.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Socioecology shapes child and adolescent time allocation in twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence forager societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Child dietary patterns inEvolution, medicine, and public health · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our species' long childhood is hypothesized to have evolved as a period for learning complex foraging skills. Researchers studying the development of foraging proficiency have focused on assessing this hypothesis, yet studies present inconsistent conclusions regarding the connection between foraging skill development and niche complexity. Here, we leverage published records of child and adolescent foragers from 28 societies to (i) quantify how skill-intensive different resources are and (ii) assess whether children's proficiency increases more slowly for more skill-intensive resources. We find that foraging returns increase slowly for more skill-intensive, difficult-to-extract resources (tubers and game), consistent with peak productivity attained in adulthood. Foraging returns for easier-to-extract resources (fruit and fish/shellfish) increase rapidly during childhood, with adult levels of productivity reached by adolescence. Our findings support the view that long childhoods evolved as an extended period for learning to extract complex resources characteristic of the human foraging niche.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.