Nicholas G. Blurton-Jones

PROFESSOR EMERITUS

Ph.D., Oxford 1962

(Not teaching)

Curriculum Vitae

Class Websites

Fax: 310-206-7833
E-mail: nickbj@.ucla.edu

Mailing Address:

Research Interests

Biological anthropology, human ethology and ecology; evolutionary theory and cross-cultural patterns of mother-infant interaction.

Selected Publications

Click here for a list of recent publications.

The following are draft chapters for a book on Hadza demography and sociobiology. I will be eager to collect criticisms, comments and questions.

Hadza Demography and Sociobiology

Part One: Demography
Click here for the entire Part 1 in one file.

1. Introduction. The Hadza hunter-gatherers of northern Tanzania. link
2. Geography of the Eyasi basin. Patchy savanna with 68 thousand Baobab trees, 17 million metric tons of tubers, and lots of grass. link
3. Lost at the bottom of the rift valley? History in, and around the Eyasi basin. link
4. Demographic methods among people who move house every few weeks, do not know how old they are, and often change their names. link
5. Are they a population? Change of ethnicity and migration: attempting a close study of tiny numbers. link
6. Are they a population? Intermarriage, how forager populations disappear. link
7. Are they a population? Hadza regions, are they sub-populations? link
8. Estimating fertility and its stability. Average humans. link
9. Estimating mortality and its stability. Plenty of grandparents. link
10. Testing the estimates with the stable population assumption. link
11. Testing the estimates: age structure as another test and as a record of recent history. link
12. Testing the estimates: age at death distribution, have paleo - demographers been studying some other species? link
13. Testing the estimates by predicting the size of sibships. link
14. Hadza, the “median hunter-gatherers” compared to their nation, and the molecular genetic evidence about their earlier population sizes. link
15. Hadza and the forager population paradox. If hunter-gatherers increase so rapidly, how come the world was so empty before agriculture? link

Part Two: Sociobiology and individual variation

Chapters are: Measuring reproductive success and its variance; Reputations; Marriage; Anthropometry; Inter-birth intervals; Effects of Grandmothers; Fathers; Children and other helpers; Overview of Hadza men and women’s reproductive strategies. Analyses complete. Editing, tidying, clarifying underway.

Meanwhile, everyone should look for a copy of Frank Marlowe’s The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania, University of California Press, 2010. It is an excellent introduction to these lively and important people and a rather comprehensive summary of research on them. Frank was a Ph.D student in this department, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1997.

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