ScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2005) — A groundbreaking new study examines the origins of holiday giving and finds that our early human ancestors were frequently altruistic.

"Reciprocity is arguably the foundational basis of cooperation in humans," writes Michael Gurven (University of California - Santa Barbara). "A core feature of reciprocity is the contingent relationship between acts of giving and receiving among social partners. Contingency is important because it sets the rules for who qualifies as a free-rider or cheater in exchange relations."

A rigorous effort to quantify the extent and magnitude of different forms of payback in exchange relationships, the study, forthcoming in the February 2006 issue of Current Anthropology, will be critical for resolving heated debates about the function of altruism among hunter-gatherers.

Strict forms of contingency require tit-for-tat, while more forgiving forms emphasize the work effort or relative contributions of others. Gurven examined food exchanges in two small-scale, non-market societies -- a classic context for understanding the evolution of conditional cooperation in humans.

"Without some kind of payback, altruism can be a very costly endeavor in small-scale societies subsisting on wild foods," Gurven writes. "This study shows that people indeed share more with those who give more to them... [but] families who cannot produce much food, close kin, and nearby neighbors sometimes receive more than they give."

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology is a prestigious transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. For more information, please see the Web site: www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA

Michael Gurven, "The Evolution of Contingent Cooperation." Current Anthropology 47:1.

Related Stories

Humans Have A Strong Desire To Help Each Other, But Is Spite Also Part Of The Human Condition? (Jan. 25, 2006) — In a new study, chimpanzees from the Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Centre in Leipzig were given a choice; by pulling on a rope they could either deliver food to another chimpanzee or they could ...  > read more

Stone Tool And Bone Find Earliest Ever Excavated (Nov. 5, 2003) — Michael Rogers, an assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Connecticut State University, has discovered the earliest direct evidence of stone tool manufacture and use in a controlled setting, ...  > read more

Insects' 'Giant Leap' Reconstructed By Founder Of Sociobiology (Jan. 4, 2008) — A survey of advanced social organization in insects calls into question the standard explanation for eusociality Biologist Edward O. Wilson argues that natural selection acting on emergent traits of ...  > read more

Early Hominids May Have Behaved More 'Human' Than We Had Thought (Aug. 7, 2003) — Our earliest ancestors probably behaved in a much more "human" way than most scientists have previously thought, according to a recent study that looked at early hominid fossils from ...  > read more

Search ScienceDaily

The Taste Gene