@article {311133,
	title = {Networks of Food Sharing Reveal the Functional Significance of Multilevel Sociality in Two Hunter-Gatherer Groups},
	journal = {Current Biology},
	volume = {26},
	year = {2016},
	month = {08/2016},
	pages = {2017 - 2021},
	abstract = {<p>Like many other mammalian and primate societies [1{\textendash}4], humans are said to live in multilevel social groups, with individuals situated in a series of hierarchically structured sub-groups [5, 6]. Although this multilevel\&nbsp;social organization has been described among contemporary hunter-gatherers [5], questions remain as to the benefits that individuals derive from\&nbsp;living in such groups. Here, we show that food sharing among two populations of contemporary hunter-gatherers{\textemdash}the Palanan Agta (Philippines) and Mbendjele BaYaka (Republic of Congo){\textemdash}reveals similar multilevel social structures, with individuals situated in households, within sharing clusters of 3{\textendash}4 households, within the wider residential camps, which vary in size. We suggest that these groupings serve to facilitate inter-sexual provisioning, kin provisioning, and risk reduction reciprocity, three levels of cooperation argued to be fundamental in human societies [7, 8]. Humans have a suite of derived life history characteristics including a long childhood and short inter-birth intervals that make offspring energetically demanding [9] and have moved to a dietary niche that often involves the exploitation of difficult to acquire foods with highly variable return rates [10{\textendash}12]. This means that human foragers face both day-to-day and more long-term energetic deficits that conspire to make humans energetically interdependent. We suggest that a multilevel social organization allows individuals access to both the food sharing partners required to buffer themselves against energetic shortfalls and the cooperative partners required for skill-based tasks such as cooperative foraging.</p>
},
	isbn = {0960-9822},
	url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216305644},
	author = {Dyble, Mark and Thompson, James and Smith, Daniel and Salali, Gul~Deniz and Chaudhary, Nikhil and Page, Abigail~E. and Vinicuis, Lucio and Mace, Ruth and Migliano, Andrea~Bamberg}
}
