Key questions, key areas:

#Grandmothering/#cooperative #childcare. Do women experience this support? Are they living with Mum? (Hawkes et al, Hrdy, Opie and Power, Knight, Migliano, Scelza)

If #matrilocal, is #brideservice more productive than if #patrilocal (Marlowe, Woodburn)? what factors influence residence patterns? Do brothers keep check on husbands (Hill et al on bro/sis relation, which is an evolutionary novelty for great apes)?

Abundance, #biggame + women's #economic #autonomy (Lewis, Woodburn, Marlowe, Blurton Jones, Lee, Thomas). In what contexts can men be lazy and live off women's work? When do women get demanding with sex contingent on produce like honey and fatty meat? Women like meat (Biesele)!

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Women_Like_Meat.html?id=MDaBAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

An earlier review of 2022 studies on #Neanderthal #family life. Social structure according to #genetics looks like #patrilocal with #females moving out of groups.

We are close to 💯 per cent certain that #Homosapiens did the exact opposite -- daughters stayed with their mums, and sons-in-law came into the group to do #brideservice. We are so sure here because it's what #African #huntergatherers do. As a result, our lineage flourishes (thanks to grandmothers), Neanderthals dwindled (lack of grandmothers?) and numerous Neanderthal women could have moved into the incoming African origin groups.

#humanorigins #anthropology #Pleistocene #kinship

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2822%2901755-9

Hands up! Which of us has NEVER had sex for ANY economic reason whatsoever? A meal?rent? Feeding the kids? And remember Marx said under #capitalism 'prostitution is just a specific case of the general prostitution of the worker'.

Except that hunting people's take control of the situation by separating the hunter from the meat right away. When a young hunter marries, he does #brideservice His boss is his mother-in-law (big respect). If he misbehaves or is just lazy, she will withdraw her daughter's sexual services! The meat comes to the doorstep pronto.

We've made lots of predictions from FCC over the years, ranging over the archaeology of ochre, the fossil record and African hunter-gatherer ethnography. We're happy to be tested on these.

First, the authors agree there is no good ochre record in #Acheulean levels; we don't expect that before significant brain-size increase.
But what did we say on stages? We identified two main phases: first ad hoc with improvisatory use of cosmetics (maybe with biodegradable material, plant pigments or just blood itself). This would occur as and when somebody actually menstruated, so it's not necessarily fully symbolic. A second stage, pushed by the pressure of brain-size, became regular and habitual, underpinning a symbolically structured sexual division of labour -- looking like #brideservice among hunter-gatherers today. Such regular ritual would organise kinship, sex and economics.

The ROCEEH authors pinpoint 3 phases (initial/emergent/habitual). Looking at their chart here, we see a lengthy build-up of usage, then a sharpish inflection into habitual use. So it's fairly arbitrary how that's divided up.

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Image: chart from Dapschauskas et al showing timesmoothing of the ochre dataset, x axis is Age (ka), y axis is density, with significant uptick around 160,000 years