Navigating, exploring and thinking about a place is part of everyday life, whether it is carving a path through crowds, walking a back path or moving into a parking space.
For most of human history, food was needed to guide the path and day-to-day movement of the nation. And unlike other prime ministers, our gender has consistently divided this work by gender.
In new research published in Human Behavior Nature, scientists including James Holland Jones of Stanford and lead author Brian Wood of the University of California, Los Angeles, argue that the ever-increasing division of labor in human societies in the 2.5 The last million years have greatly shaped how our species use space, and perhaps how we think about it.
Underpinning these findings is a large and detailed collection of travel data revealing significant differences in the ways in which men and women among the religious people of Hadza in Tanzania use space. In the society of contemporary hunter-gatherers, the Hadza provides a window into a highly mobile lifestyle, which was the norm for our species before extensive agriculture was undertaken.
“We take gender differences as presented in this particular cultural setting, and then ask what their impact is downstream,” said Jones, a professor. associate of Earth system science at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) and senior at Stanford Woods Institute of Environment.
A better understanding of this dynamic would give clues as to why men and women seem to think of place in a different way. Research in many human populations shows that men and women are better at different types of spatial functions. On average, women tend to excel at spatial memory functions, while men tend to score higher on two basic measures of spatial experience related to movement: the mental circulation of objects and the identify correctly to distant locations.
‘Male work is more challenging to navigate’
The paper examines a popular theory that male hunting for wild game would lead to wider and older travels, and that females harvesting plant food would lead to more direct, direct travel to and from known places.
While previous attempts to prove the theory have relied heavily on verbal accounts, the researchers here tested it by examining more than 13,000 miles of recorded traffic on lightweight GPS trackers. which Hadza hunters would spend between 2005 and 2018. “One or two explorers would walk through camp early in the morning when people were rejoicing,” the authors write. “We would welcome people at their homes or fireplaces and provide GPS devices that would be worn during the day.”
Around the fall of night, when most returned to camp, Wood and aides hired in the Hadza community removed the machines. They eventually used data from 179 people, representing 15 camps and ranging in age from two to 84 years.
The authors also examined the degree of duplication in the lands visited by men and women. “One of the most striking findings in this study was that Hadza men and women essentially lived in a different world from a young age. In our data, most of the landscape was separated into sex, “said Wood, assistant professor of anthropology. at UCLA who began working on this paper ten years ago as a graduate scholar at Stanford.
To analyze the motion data, the researchers took methods from the field of motion ecology and developed custom software as well. As would be expected, the results show that men would walk longer in the day, covering more land in less direct routes and more likely to travel alone. “In this hunting and gathering context, male work is more challenging in terms of navigation,” the researchers write.
While some individual day trips extended to 20 miles or more, Hadza men averaged eight miles a day and women – many with young children – averaged nearly five miles. Gender differences appeared before the age of six. From the mid-forties, the gender difference declined, largely due to the decline in travel by men while women maintained more than their daily mileage.
Human movement in a changing world
Detailed spatial data such as those collected in this study will aid future comparative study of human mobility, according to the authors. This is particularly strong in the case of a pandemic that has led to abrupt revisions of normal movement patterns and highlighted the costs and benefits of different spatial practices.
Wood has already begun to apply technical, logistical, and scientific lessons from this study to a new project by the National Science Foundation that seeks to help identify research and policy priorities to prepare the U.S. for pandemics. -avoidable in the future – partly by measuring trends and models of social patterns. interaction. “The study of human movement can be used to identify communities at risk for the spread and spread of disease,” Wood explained.
Even when we are not in a pandemic, Jones said, the movement of people drives economic activity, social cohesion and environmental impacts. And the environment, in turn, shapes spatial behavior. That feedback loop is at the heart of some of the internal migration patterns that are already emerging in response to global warming. As weather events that were once rare are common, Jones explained, migrant workers may travel longer distances for work; more people engage in seasonal migration to pursue agricultural work or escape hurricanes and drought, and crop failure drives more rural residents to urban areas.
Mobility change is one of the main ways in which people transition to a warming world. Finding out more about gender differences and other drivers for spatial behavior across a wide range of human populations and ecological contexts will help us anticipate how this change will play out and informing policies to govern it. “
James Holland Jones, Associate Professor of Earth System Science, Stanford
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Magazine Reference:
Wood, BM, et al. (2021) Ecology of species movement and landscape use in Hadza hunter-gatherers. Human Behavior Nature. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01002-7.