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| Efe people Ituri Forest Anthrophoto is an excellent source for anthropology stock photos |
There have been many studies of what impresses us about members of the opposite sex, but to my knowledge these studies are largely centered on Western societies, and never of foragers. There has been consideration of this issue, but no large scale surveys. One of the reasons for this is that you can’t do large scale surveys in so-called “small scale” societies, because there are just not enough people.
But I can provide a few insights on what might be impressive to the ladies (things about men) in forager societies. Keep in mind, however, that this is strictly speculation, though informed speculation.
I had previously talked about sharing, and here I’d like to expand on one aspect of sharing … the so called “distribution and redistribution system,” and it’s meaning in relation to courting.
There is a pattern that has been observed in virtually all forager groups, whereby men divide up the spoils of the hunt in a certain, largely ritualized way, then pass these packages of meat over to the women, who then redistribute the meat in a manner commensurate with the needs of members of the group. I’d like to describe how this works specifically with the Efe Pygmies as an exemplar for foragers in general. Many aspects of what I’m describing here are nearly universal among foragers. Moreover, I’m going to specifically talk about “group hunting” when several men are involved in one cooperative hunting episode. However, the principles involved here actually apply to other forms of hunting as well, to varying degrees.
The most common Efe group hunt is called “mota.” In this method of hunting, a number of men spread out in the forest to surround an area, with one man (the “beater”) going to the center of this area with one or more dogs. The dogs are released by the beater, sent out into this area and called back again and again. Game that is roused by the dogs are then subject to being shot at with arrows by the archers who had previously spread out. If an animal is hit, help from other hunters or from the dogs may be solicited, and the animal run to ground and dispatched.
The animals are usually carried back to (more…)
Professor Desmond Clark, the consummate British gentleman and Africanist archaeologist, was fond of telling his intro class “if we were chimpanzees instead of humans this class would be severely interrupted owing to the presence of at least one or two ovulating females in the room at this moment.” I never took a class from Desmond (different school) but this quip was passed on to me by Glynn Isaac, and Glynn has passed it on to all of his students, we to ours, and so on. So this little off-the-cuff joke is surely repeated sixty or seventy times per semester, worldwide. 
There many ways of dividing up and categorizing Natural Selection. For example, there are the Natural Selection, Sexual Selection and Artificial Selection, and then there is the Modes of Selection (Stabilizing, Directional, and Disruptive) trichotomy. 
This is the first of a series of posts on the biology of gender. This is a research interest of mine, and generally has a big part in my teaching as well.
I was recently looking at a practice AP biology test question on evolution, and sparing you the details, I found it interesting that two of the four parts dealt with genetic variation and speciation in such a way that it was difficult to tell them apart. As expected, students who answered these questions got confused as well, and tended to give perfectly good answers to Part B, but unfortunately, this was their answer to Part A. By the time they got to Part B they seemed a little confused, perhaps realizing that there was some overlap and conflation of concepts.