Hi Debora, you need to specify the period at least, or the period and the region. We still have hunter-gatherers in some regions. You can go and research them.

Collaterally you have some information in the work done in El Sidrón cave.

Try the Human Relations Area File (HRAF). It's available on-line by subscription from Yale University. The HRAF contains thousands of ethnographies from around the world, and the contents of the ethnographies are coded by cultural characteristics. You can search by subsistence type to find hunters and gatherers, and then search the ethnographies of these cultures for mentions of pregnancy and newborns. The HRAF will display sections of text that contain your search topics.

Todd Surovell

2000 Early Paleoindian women, children, mobility, and fertility, American Antiquity 65(3).

Here are some sources you might find useful:

Bentley, Gillian R. 1996. "How Did Prehistoric Women Bear 'Man the Hunter'? Reconstructing Fertility from the Archaeological Record." In Gender and Archaeology, edited by Rita P. Wright, 23-51. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kelly, Robert L. 1995. The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Lee, Richard B. 1972. "Population Growth and the Beginnings of Sedentary Life among the !Kung Bushmen." In Population Growth: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Brian Spooner, 329-342. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Peacock, Nadine R. 1991. "Rethinking the Sexual Division of Labor: Reproduction and Women's Work among the Efe." In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, edited by Micaela Di Leonardo, 339-360. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stone, Linda. 2006. Kinship and Gender: An Introduction. 3 ed. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

Hi Debora,

here's a work about pregnancy in early Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers:

MUSSI M. 2007. Women of the Middle Latitudes. The Earliest Peopling of Europe from a Female Perspective. In W. Roebroeks (ed.), Guts and Brains: An integrative approach to the Hominin Record, pp. 165-184. Leiden/Amsterdam: Leiden University Press Academic.

I think Colin Turnbull's book on the Forest People might help (thought his ethnographic study is quite old)

Two classic books treat these issues in part:  Nancy Howell's Demography of the Dobe! Kung and Hill and Hurtado's Ache Life History.

The citations you have been given above already are excellent, especially the HRAF files, Nancy Howell's book on the Dobe! Kung, and the Hill/Hurtado work.  I would suggest also reviewing Holmberg's work on the Siriono and and various works on the Yanomamo, especially by Napoleon Chagnon.   George Devereux wrote a classic, A Study of Abortion in Primitive Societies (Julian Press, 1955) that is an essential work on this subject.   I have several publications on polygyny, fertility, and demography of the Shipibo of the Peruvian Amazon.   They are not the classic hunter/gatherer society, but they were not far from that when I first went to visit them in 1964, especially some of the more remote villages.    Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book in infanticide should be on your list. 

In my book "People of Sunlight" we found 4 of 5 Chipewyan births dating to AD1850 were in Feb., March and April; 9 months after caribou herd migration, when fat in the diet was highest. The Chipewyan depended fully on caribou and if I recall correctly, a woman needs 12% body fat to menstruate and 18% to bring a baby to term. This is part of my discrete band/discrete herd hypthesis and applies to all females depending mainly on one migratory (or seasonally available) food source like reindeer, anadromous fish like salmon, plus ancient bison, horse, antelope and birds.

Thanks to all for your help. I took note of the references you suggested. By the way, these are some of the references I am already using, in case you are interested, too;

Volk, T., & Atkinson, J. (2008). Is child death the crucible of human evolution?.Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2(4), 247. Dufour, D. L., & Sauther, M. L. (2002). Comparative and evolutionary dimensions of the energetics of human pregnancy and lactation. American Journal of Human Biology, 14(5), 584-602. Kaplan, H. (1996). A theory of fertility and parental investment in traditional and modern human societies. American journal of physical anthropology, 101(s 23), 91-135. Spielmann, K. A. (1989). A review: dietary restrictions on hunter-gatherer women and the implications for fertility and infant mortality. Human ecology,17(3), 321-345. Hawkes, K., Smith, K. R., & Robson, S. L. (2009). Mortality and fertility rates in humans and chimpanzees: How within‐species variation complicates cross‐species comparisons. American Journal of Human Biology, 21(4), 578-586.

More than 30,000 year old burials of newborns have been found at Krems-Wachtberg in east Austria. See e.g.:

Einwögerer, T., Friesinger, H., Händel, M., Neugebauer-Maresch, C., Simon, U., and Teschler-Nicola, M. 2006. Upper Palaeolithic infant burials. Decorations on the bodies of newborns indicate that they were probably important in their community. Nature 444: 285.

There are detailed data on your 2nd and 3rd question in the free online *Agta Demographic Database*. Just google those three words, in quotes. The Agta are a Negrito hunter-gatherer people in the Philippines.

You might have heard the name of Helen Valera. She was a Brazilian, and at the age of roughly five years she was abducted by the Yanomamo(?) native brazilians. She stayed with them until puberty (c. 15 years) and then returned to ehr own kith and kin. Her memoirs have been treated by various people (Ettore Biocca sprinsg to my mind). I think she provides data on preganancy and childbirth in the native Brazilian population.

They're long books, but you might also check into Sarah Hrdy's books "Mothers and Others" or "Mother Nature." I see you've referenced Dr. Kristen Hawkes, she teaches materials from these books in her Behavioral Ecology course. There is quite a bit about infanticide, and both books are loaded with other references related to your research topic. 

Robert Kelly's new book on Hunter gatherers has a great new chapter on demography with many sources.listed.

I wrote a review of it if that helps.

Kevan

Abrazos Debora, 

I'm glad that Tom Headland weighed in, he has great longitudinal data for the Agta. I'm sure you are familiar with the second edition of Nancy Howell's "Demography of the Dobe !Kung" (2000, Aldine de Gruyter, New York) and Kim Hill and M. A. Hurtado's "Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People", 1996, Aldine de Gruyter, New York. You probably also have looked at Renee Pennington's Hunter-gatherer demography chapter that compares soem published data in Panter-Brick, C., R. H. Layton, and P. Rowley-Conway (eds), Hunter-Gatherers: An  Interdisciplinary Perspective, pp.170-204, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge You should look at Karen and my Pume paper (2007 Karen L. Kramer and Russell D. Greaves. Changing patterns of infant mortality and fertility among Pumé foragers and horticulturalists. American Anthropologist 109 (4):713-726; or the Spanish version:  2010 Karen L. Kramer and Russell D. Greaves. Cambios en los patrones de mortalidad infantil y fertilidad entre cazadores-recolectores y horticultores Pumé: implicaciones para el crecimiento poblacional y desarrollo sostenible. Antropológica 54 (113):5-41.) Paula Ivey studied Efe ("Pygmy") women and allocare in the mid 1990s, she may have some demographic data, you can say that I suggested you contact her ([email protected]). If that email does not work I can get you in contact with her another way. Although the Semai data in Alan Fix's study were agricultural at the time of his work, they were a former hunter-gatherers group: A. G. Fix, 1977. The Demography of the Semai Senoi. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Anthropological Paper N0. 62, Ann Arbor. Did you have a chance to ask  Karen about references when you saw her at CHAGS? 

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