Post by J85K on Aug 11, 2016 4:50:13 GMT -4
"We noticed that the old females would lead from the front - they're guiding their groups, their families, around to find food," says Croft.
Crucially, he and Franks also noticed that the older females took the lead more often during years when salmon supplies were low - suggesting that the pod might be reliant on their experience, their ecological knowledge.
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37025092
There is also evidence from the few remaining human hunter-gatherer societies that older females help their children, and their children's children, survive - a phenomenon dubbed the "grandmother effect".
University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who has studied the Hadza people of northern Tanzania since the 1980s, has observed how older women are particularly industrious, and spend more time foraging for their families than younger women.
"Kids in this Hadza hunter-gatherer population are also surprisingly active foragers at very young ages, but - as in all human populations - they can't fully feed themselves when they are weaned and still depended on food supplied by their mothers," she says.
"But when mothers had a new baby - the weaned youngsters depended on grandmothers. So we saw grandmothers' subsidies in action in those people, that would have likely operated in ancestral [human] populations."
Crucially, he and Franks also noticed that the older females took the lead more often during years when salmon supplies were low - suggesting that the pod might be reliant on their experience, their ecological knowledge.
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37025092
There is also evidence from the few remaining human hunter-gatherer societies that older females help their children, and their children's children, survive - a phenomenon dubbed the "grandmother effect".
University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who has studied the Hadza people of northern Tanzania since the 1980s, has observed how older women are particularly industrious, and spend more time foraging for their families than younger women.
"Kids in this Hadza hunter-gatherer population are also surprisingly active foragers at very young ages, but - as in all human populations - they can't fully feed themselves when they are weaned and still depended on food supplied by their mothers," she says.
"But when mothers had a new baby - the weaned youngsters depended on grandmothers. So we saw grandmothers' subsidies in action in those people, that would have likely operated in ancestral [human] populations."