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Harm Avoidance and Mobility During Middle Childhood and Adolescence among Hadza Foragers

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Abstract

Cross-cultural sex differences in mobility and harm avoidance have been widely reported, often emphasizing fitness benefits of long-distance travel for males and high costs for females. Data emerging from adults in small-scale societies, however, are challenging the assumption that female mobility is restricted during reproduction. Such findings warrant further exploration of the ontogeny of mobility. Here, using a combination of machine-learning, mixed-effects linear regression, and GIS mapping, we analyze range size, daily distance traveled, and harm avoidance among Hadza foragers during middle childhood and adolescence. Distance traveled increased with age and, while male adolescents had the longest daily ranges, average daily distance traveled by each sex was similar. We found few age- or sex-related patterns in harm-avoidant responses and a high degree of individual variation. When queried on the same issues, children and their parents were often in alignment as to expectations pertaining to harm avoidance, and siblings tended to behave in similar ways. To the extent that sex differences in mobility did emerge, they were associated with ecological differences in physical threats associated with sex-specific foraging behaviors. Further, we found no strong association between harm avoidance and mobility. Young Hadza foragers of both sexes are highly mobile, regardless of how harm avoidant they are. Taken together, our findings indicate that the causal arrows between harm avoidance and mobility must be evaluated in ecologically specific frameworks where cultural expectations of juvenile mobility can be contextualized.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Hadza families who participated in this study. We would also like to thank Helen Elizabeth Davis for helpful feedback on early drafts of this manuscript and Phoebe McNeally from the DIGIT Lab at the University of Utah for research support and analytical assistance. This research was funded by grant #162858 from the National Science Foundation (to E. Cashdan and A. Crittenden).

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Author notes

  1. These authors (ANC and AF) contributed equally to this paper.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Alyssa N. Crittenden, Alan Farahani, Kristen N. Herlosky & Trevor R. Pollom

  2. National Museum of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

    Ibrahim A. Mabulla

  3. Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Ian T. Ruginski & Elizabeth Cashdan

  4. Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Ian T. Ruginski

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  1. Alyssa N. Crittenden
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Contributions

ANC and AF contributed equally to this paper. EC and ANC acquired research funding, designed the study, and prepared data collection materials. Data were collected by KNH, TRP, and IAM. Analyses were performed by AF, ANC, KNH, and ITG. The first draft of the manuscript was written by ANC and AF; all authors commented on subsequent versions of the manuscript; all authors read and approved of the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Alyssa N. Crittenden.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were done so in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board in the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (protocol # 1048457-1), the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Table 5 Interview questions asked of children and juveniles not included in Table 1
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Crittenden, A.N., Farahani, A., Herlosky, K.N. et al. Harm Avoidance and Mobility During Middle Childhood and Adolescence among Hadza Foragers. Hum Nat 32, 150–176 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09390-z

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