Publications

Here, using in-depth observational data on who for cares for 78 Agta children (aged 0-6 years, a foraging population in northern Philippines), we explore whether allomaternal childcare substitutes (and thus decreases) maternal childcare.

Editorial for the special issue 'Multidisciplinary perspectives on social support and maternal-child health

Special issue of Philosophical transaction of the Royal Society B edited by Abigail E. Page, Sarah Myers and Emily H. Emmott

Using survey data collected online from 515 UK mothers with infants aged 0–108 weeks, Cox regression models assessed the relationship between receiving different types of support, support need and breastfeeding duration.

Here, we test the hypothesis that social support buffers mothers from the negative impact breastfeeding problems have on duration on a sample of 566 UK mothers who completed a retrospective online survey about infant feeding and social support in 2017-2018.

We provide recommendations about the application of hunter-gatherer data to the study of demographic trends throughout human evolution. We use published demographic data from extant hunter-gatherers to show that it is the diversity seen among extant hunter-gatherers that is most relevant for understanding past hunter-gatherer demography.

Using retrospective data from an online survey of UK mothers of children aged 0–24 months, Cox-Aalen survival models test whether negative subjective environmental experiences negatively correlated with any and exclusive breastfeeding.

Our reply to comments by Harpur and Haddon (2020) on our paper on the typologies of social support and its associations with breastfeeding at two months in a UK sample.

Here, we investigated the effect of multilevel sociality on cumulative cultural evolution by using wireless sensing technology to map inter- and intraband social networks among Agta hunter-gatherers.

Using retrospective data from an UK-based online survey (data collection period December 2017 - February 2018), we carry out a latent class regression (n = 432) to identify “clusters” of postnatal support in our data.

We used high-resolution proximity data from 1,701 child–alloparent dyads to test why alloparents help in the Agta.

Introductory chapter about alloparenting (Caregiving by nonparental caregivers, who provide direct and/or indirect investments to a child).

A long-standing hypothesis suggests that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture results in people working harder, spending more time engaged in subsistence activities and having less leisure time. Here we test this hypothesis by examining adult time allocation among the Agta.

The Agta, a foraging population from the Philippines, have a skewed sex ratio of 1.29 (129 males per 100 females) aged 15 years or under. We hypothesised that this skew was not caused by greater female deaths, but due to an adaptive response, where more males were produced at birth in reaction to high male-biased extrinsic mortality. To test this hypothesis we utilise census, childcare and mortality data from 915 Agta.

A recent suite of models based upon ‘cooperative assortativity’ suggest that non-kin cooperation can evolve if individuals preferentially assort with certain cooperative phenotypes, such as helping those who help others. Here, we test these assortative hypotheses among the Agta, a population of Filipino hunter-gatherers, using an experimental resource allocation game in which individuals divide resources between themselves and camp-mates.

Recent research in the Agta (Philippine foragers from North-east Luzon) has demonstrated that individuals residing in more ‘developed’ communities suffer from increased morbidity and mortality. Here, using quantitative and ethnographic data on health collected between 2002 and 2014, we explore why this trend occurs by examining the relationship between key development initiatives with self-reported illness and the uptake of medical interventions with 415 Agta men, women and children.

Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller

Understanding demographic and evolutionary processes shaping human life history diversity depends on precise age estimations. Inferring age is a challenge in small-scale societies, and especially in those societies that do not follow a calendar year. Our method opens possibilities in demographic and life history studies allowing cross-sectional data to be incorporated in cross-cultural comparisons and a better understanding of the adaptive importance of human life history variation.

Here, we present the first exploration in humans of the relationship between reproductive success and different measures of network centrality of 39 Agta and 38 BaYaka mothers.

We developed a portable wireless sensing technology (motes) to study within-camp proximity networks among Agta and BaYaka hunter-gatherers in fine detail.

Here we examine the reported co-occurrence of plant uses between individuals in dyads (which we define as their “shared knowledge” of plant uses) in BaYaka Pygmies from Congo.

Networks of food sharing among two populations of hunter-gatherers are explored.

Competition and cooperation also occur within groups; and inter-individual differences in sociality have reported fitness implications in numerous non-human taxa. Here we investigate whether differential access to cooperation (relational wealth) is likely to lead to variation in fitness at the individual level among BaYaka hunter-gatherers.

Here we explore cooperation among the Agta, a population of Filipino hunter–gatherers, using data from both actual resource transfers and two experimental games across multiple camps.

The rise of agriculture during the Neolithic period has paradoxically been associated with worldwide population growth despite increases in disease and mortality. We examine the effects of sedentarization and cultivation on disease load, mortality, and fertility among Agta foragers.

In order to elucidate the evolution of hunter–gatherer polygyny, we study marriage patterns of BaYaka Pygmies. We investigate (i) rates of polygyny among BaYaka hunter–gatherers; (ii) whether polygyny confers a fitness benefit to BaYaka men; (iii) in the absence of wealth inequalities, what are the alternative explanations for polygyny among the BaYaka.

Evolutionary theory stresses the importance of living with kin, not least because they share some of our genes. Nevertheless, a large-scale assessment of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies has established a consistent pattern of unrelated individuals living together. Here we used a modelling approach to suggest that a possible answer to this conundrum is that cohabitation choices are being governed equally by men and women.