"A clearly presented and terrifically detailed work from the perspective of human evolutionary life histories. Dr. Howell has written a text that manages to raise as many intriguing questions as it provides to answer."—Eric A. Roth, author of Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Demography

"Nancy Howell's book on the Demography of the Dobe !Kung became an anthropological classic, the first in-depth analysis of the population structures and life histories of a foraging society. Three decades later, Howell returns to her initial data set to ask new questions inspired by Life History Theory. In the process she examines how variations in group composition impact the well-being of !Kung children, revealing that sharing is not just with one's closest relatives."—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding

"This is a unique, scholarly book that reads like a detective novel. Howell uses demographic, anthropometric, and foraging data on the !Kung hunter-gatherers of Southern Africa to investigate what explains variation in the nutritional well-being of their children. Each chapter builds on the previous one, and through a process of elimination brings us closer to the answers, which are often surprising. Along the way, we see how food sharing is necessary to explain the peculiar elements of human life history."—Frank Marlowe, author of The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania

Nancy Howell is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

Life Histories of the Dobe !Kung

Food, Fatness, and Well-being Over the Life Span

By Nancy Howell

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26234-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix,
1. Another Look at the !Kung: A Life History Approach, 1,
2. Life History Stages, 19,
3. Body Size and Growth, 49,
4. Calories Required, 83,
5. Caloric Productivity and Caloric Balance, 107,
6. Caloric Balance and Residential Units: Waterholes, Living Groups, Households, 127,
7. Kinship Relations as a Support System for Children, 157,
8. Motives for Sharing Food and Other Prosocial Behavior, 183,
References, 211,
Index, 221,

CHAPTER 1

Another Look at the !Kung

A Life History Approach

In 1967 I was privileged to go to southern Africa to live with the !Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari desert. I was in the final stages of my Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard, and recently married to Richard Lee, who had already spent a year and a half living with the !Kung San people and learning their language. Richard was a lecturer at Harvard at that time, and he applied to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health with his longtime collaborator Irven DeVore (a new professor at Harvard then) for funding to support a substantial study of the !Kung, involving fourteen scholars, including me. When they were awarded the grant in 1966, I hurried to finish my dissertation before the !Kung project started.

RESEARCH WITH THE DOBE !KUNG

Richard and I flew to Johannesburg, consulted with colleagues, bought a truck, and loaded it up, adding supplies at each stage of the journey. We drove first to Gaborone, the new capital of Botswana, to get final research permissions; then to Francistown, where we left the paved road parallel to the only railroad line in the country to drive west and north to Maun, on the Okavango delta. We rented a mailbox at the post office in Maun, and bought our last-minute supplies from their few general stores and a garage, and finally drove in our new truck to Nokaneng, a small town on the edge of the Kalahari. There we offloaded all but one of the drums of petrol we had brought from Maun, to create a storage system that would allow us to move safely between Maun and the isolated Dobe area on the Namibian border, where we were headed. From Nokaneng, in July 1967, we drove the last eight-hour stretch across the waterless 100 km or so that we called "the Middle Passage," to the string of ten waterholes on the Botswana-Namibia border that maps call the Xangwa (or Gwanwa) area, but which we always called the Dobe area. The name Dobe, easy to spell and pronounce (doe-bee), refers to one of the smallest waterholes there, where Richard had been welcomed into the !Kung kinship system in 1964 during his earlier visit.

That was a long time ago. The results of the research we did over the next two years have been described in detail in a book of preliminary research reports (Lee and DeVore, 1976) and in research monographs (Howell, 1979; see also Lee 1979) and the dozens of articles and books cited there and published since that time. The research that the fourteen of us as a research group carried out from 1967 to 1969 included studies of the biology, culture, social structure, economics, and psychology of the !Kung (or the ju /'hoansi, as they call themselves and are increasingly often called by scholars).

My own research focused on the demography. After learning the language well enough to make my questions understood, and after pre-testing the format with Richard Lee's help, I started a data collection of reproductive histories of the 165 ever-married women in the Dobe area alive in 1967 to 1969. Eventually I got them all, plus another twenty-five reproductive histories from adult women who visited the Dobe area but who did not usually live there, which I ended up not using. This data collection included all of the marriages and marriage terminations, pregnancies and pregnancy terminations, and a history of survival of each of the husbands and children mentioned by the 165 adult women.

This work was interspersed with occasional "campaigns" of data collection with Richard Lee. We took the truck to each of the ten waterholes in turn to visit each of the thirty-five or so villages, usually staying at each waterhole for a few days to make sure we had covered all the residents there. Richard and I conducted censuses in October 1967, November 1968, and April 1969, and in addition we collected measures of height, weight, and skin-fold thickness in August 1968, October 1968, January 1969, and April 1969. We measured weights, especially of children, continuously, wherever we had people and the scale in the same place, but the "campaigns" were especially organized to include all of the members of the population, to look for seasonal changes in weight and height. These sweeps through the population also provided occasions for successive stages of my estimations of the ages of individuals, which consisted of rank ordering the people in local areas by age, and then merging those local age-ranks into a single rank order, later fitting a curve from stable-population theory to the rank order to estimate individual ages, and then checking the plausibility of the resulting estimates.

These data collections were designed to be holistic inventories of the contemporary Dobe !Kung people, including everything that was possible to observe about an ongoing population of people that would allow us to describe in detail how their society operated. Howell (2000) details the data collection and analysis of the fieldwork from 1967 to 1969.

RESEARCH RESULTS: DEMOGRAPHY OF THE DOBE !KUNG

Briefly, the book Demography of the Dobe !Kung shows one way to construct a demographic description of a small population in which there are no historical records and people don't know their own ages. After sorting out the interrelated issues of the age estimates and the population age structure, I presented a chapter on causes of death during recent decades, and then the life tables, for the two sexes, and for different periods of time. The study revealed that mortality was high overall (an approximate Expectation of Life at Birth of thirty years and an Infant Mortality Rate of 200 deaths in the first year per 1,000 births) but that most !Kung appeared to be remarkably healthy (strong, energetic, cheerful) most of the time. Next, in that book, the fertility history of the women was laid out, first for the older post-reproductive women; and then for the younger women who were still building their families, showing that the fertility is remarkably low for a population that marries young and doesn't use any methods of contraception. The !Kung were found to have a Total Fertility Rate of about 4.6 children born to women who survive to the end of the childbearing period, which is a remarkably low level of natural fertility.

To examine the interactions of fertility and mortality, a computer micro-simulation program called AMBUSH was invented and used (Howell and Lehotay, 1978; Howell, 2000). The program is a stochastic model that shows what happens when you start with a population identical to the !Kung as we observed them in 1968 and simulate a future based on the observed probabilities of birth and death for varying periods of time in the future. The simulations can be thought of as an answer to the question: If there were a continent with 100 (or any number) of independent...