ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Reproductive trade-offs in extant hunter-gatherers suggest adaptive mechanism for the Neolithic expansion.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
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47 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Fifteen thousand years of bioarchaeological data reveal life history trade-offs among Europe's first farmers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid ancient human admixture.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- The genomic history of East Asian Middle Neolithic millet- and rice-agricultural populations.Cell genomics · 2025Article
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- Demography of grandmothering: a case study in Agta foragers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Physical Activity and Pregnancy Norms Among Daasanach Semi-Nomadic Pastoralist Women in Northern Kenya.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- When parental care hurts: extended parental care and the evolution of overparenting.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2025Review
- Fast and Accurate Estimation of Selection Coefficients and Allele Histories from Ancient and Modern DNA.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Population decline: where demography, social science, and biology intersect.Reproduction (Cambridge, England) · 2024Review
- The Global Decline in Human Fertility: The Post-Transition Trap Hypothesis.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- What is driving the global decline of human fertility? Need for a multidisciplinary approach to the underlying mechanisms.Frontiers in reproductive health · 2024Review
- Alcohol consumption, life history and extinction risk among Raute hunter-gatherers from Nepal.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
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- Modern Japanese ancestry-derived variants reveal the formation process of the current Japanese regional gradations.iScience · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Impact of energy availability and physical activity on variation in fertility across human populations.Journal of physiological anthropology · 2023Review
- Sedentarization and maternal childcare networks: role of risk, gender and demography.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Wealth, health and inequality in Agta foragers.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
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10 authors.
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Abstract
The Neolithic demographic transition remains a paradox, because it is associated with both higher rates of population growth and increased morbidity and mortality rates. Here we reconcile the conflicting evidence by proposing that the spread of agriculture involved a life history quality-quantity trade-off whereby mothers traded offspring survival for increased fertility, achieving greater reproductive success despite deteriorating health. We test this hypothesis by investigating fertility, mortality, health, and overall reproductive success in Agta hunter-gatherers whose camps exhibit variable levels of sedentarization, mobility, and involvement in agricultural activities. We conducted blood composition tests in 345 Agta and found that viral and helminthic infections as well as child mortality rates were significantly increased with sedentarization. Nonetheless, both age-controlled fertility and overall reproductive success were positively affected by sedentarization and participation in cultivation. Thus, we provide the first empirical evidence, to our knowledge, of an adaptive mechanism in foragers that reconciles the decline in health and child survival with the observed demographic expansion during the Neolithic.
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