R B Bird
Biographic Data
| ID | 13464 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R B Bird |
| GIVEN NAMES | R B |
| FAMILY NAME | Bird |
| SIGNATURE | BIRD R B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8350-2169 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 758 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively: Ethnohistoric Data Reveal the Contexts, Advantages, and Evolutionary Importance of Communal Hunting
We analyze a new ethnographic and ethnohistoric database of quantitative cases (n = 139) and qualitative information on a neglected form of forager subsistence—communal drive hunts (CDHs)—using a human behavioral ecology perspective. Among our key findings are that (i) in specific contexts, CDHs achieve higher return rates or lower odds of failure than encounter hunting; (ii) CDHs increase the rate of success for hunting large ungulates that clus…
People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years
Significance The current biodiversity crisis is often depicted as a struggle to preserve untouched habitats. Here, we combine global maps of human populations and land use over the past 12,000 y with current biodiversity data to show that nearly three quarters of terrestrial nature has long been shaped by diverse histories of human habitation and use by Indigenous and traditional peoples. With rare exceptions, current biodiversity losses are caus…
How can evolutionary and biological anthropologists engage broader audiences
OBJECTIVES: With our diverse training, theoretical and empirical toolkits, and rich data, evolutionary and biological anthropologists (EBAs) have much to contribute to research and policy decisions about climate change and other pressing social issues. However, we remain largely absent from these critical, ongoing efforts. Here, we draw on the literature and our own experiences to make recommendations for how EBAs can engage broader audiences, in…
Climate, landscape diversity, and food sovereignty in arid Australia: The firestick farming hypothesis
OBJECTIVE: Climate change has long been recognized as a significant driver of dietary diversity and dietary quality. An often overlooked aspect of climate change are shifts in fire regimes, which have the potential to drastically affect landscape diversity, species distributions, and ultimately, human diets. Here, we investigate whether the fire regimes shaped by Indigenous Australians change landscape diversity in ways that improve dietary quali…
Deconstructing Hunting Returns: Can We Reconstruct and Predict Payoffs from Pursuing Prey
Mass procurement and prey rankings: Insights from the European rabbit
Subsistence Transitions and the Simplification of Ecological Networks in the Western Desert of Australia
Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies
The social significance of subtle signals
Mosaics of fire and water: The co-emergence of anthropogenic landscapes and intensive seed exploitation in the Australian arid zone
In arid Australia, the antiquity, role and ecological contexts of ‘firestick’ farming in seed-based foraging economies remain unclear. We use Landsat imagery to analyse effects of contemporary Martu hunting fires on seed-bearing grasses and forbs. Today, Martu rarely harvest wild seeds but inadvertently foster patches of grass when they burn to hunt burrowing monitor lizards. Therefore, anthropogenic seed patches need only be by-products of fires…
Martu ethnoarchaeology: Foraging ecology and the marginal value of site structure
A Landscape Architecture of Fire: Cultural Emergence and Ecological Pyrodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert
Aboriginal foraging systems in Australia's Western Desert have been structured around landscape-burning practices for millennia. These systems are mediated at one end by factors that influence an immediate-return economy and at the other by the way that burning transforms vegetative succession and habitat heterogeneity (pyrodiversity). The distinctive pyrodiversity of anthropogenic landscapes are where Martu insist that they and their estates are…
Pyrodiversity and the anthropocene: The Role of Fire in the Broad Spectrum Revolution
The Anthropocene colloquially refers to a global regime of human-caused environmental modification of earth systems associated with profound changes in patterns of human mobility, as well as settlement and resource use compared with prior eras. Some have argued that the processes generating the Anthropocene are mainly associated with population growth and technological innovation, and thus began only in the late Holocene under conditions of dense…
The Sexual Division of Labor
Many evolutionary arguments fossilize a human division of labor as one of man the hunter, and woman the gatherer, with differences in labor arising out of the effectiveness of efficiency. We suggest here that arguments based solely on the efficiency of labor specialization among heterosexual married pairs over‐generalize divisions of labor that are, in reality, much more diverse. Divisions of labor can be based on age, as well as on gender, and a…
Prosocial signaling and cooperation among Martu hunters
Disturbance, Complexity, Scale: New Approaches to the Study of Human-Environment Interactions
New approaches to human-environment interactions are beginning to move beyond a narrow focus on individuals and simple (patch-level) predatory or competitive interactions. These approaches link nonequilibrium theory from community and landscape ecology with theories of individual decision making from behavioral ecology to explore new ways of approaching complex issues of diachronic change in behavior, subsistence, and social institutions. I provi…
Diesel and damper: Changes in seed use and mobility patterns following contact amongst the Martu of Western Australia
The marginal valuation of fertility
Conservation or Co-evolution? Intermediate Levels of Aboriginal Burning and Hunting Have Positive Effects on Kangaroo Populations in Western Australia
Bush Tucker, Shop Tucker: Production, Consumption, and Diet at an Aboriginal Outstation
Foraging models have rarely been used to address how behavior is altered by the presence of non-foraged foods. Here, choices of store-bought and hunted foods in one Aboriginal community are analyzed. Hunting occurs frequently, but community residents also purchase food from the shop. Increases in the frequency of hunting certain large and small prey are associated with reduced access to food in the shop. Higher-variance hunt types are not associa…
Megafauna in a continent of small game: Archaeological implications of Martu Camel hunting in Australia's Western Desert
The hierarchy of virtue: Mutualism, altruism and signaling in Martu women's cooperative hunting
Risky Pursuits: Martu Hunting and the Effects of Prey Mobility: Reply to Ugan and Simms
We recently demonstrated that prey size is not a reliable predictor of post-encounter return rates for resources Martu hunters regularly handle in Australia’s Western Desert (Bird et al. 2009). Ugan and Simms are skeptical of our calculations of these returns, especially in our inclusion of tracking as pursuit time. Here we review how these variables were recorded and calculated, update the analysis with more data, and clarify the importance of p…
Interpreting abundance indices: Some zooarchaeological implications of Martu foraging
What Explains Differences in Men's and Women's Production: Determinants of Gendered Foraging Inequalities among Martu
Signaling Theory, Strategic Interaction, and Symbolic Capital
Signaling theory provides an opportunity to integrate an interactive theory of symbolic communication and social benefit with materialist theories of individual strategic action and adaptation. This article examines the potential explanatory value of signaling theory for a variety of anthropological topics, focusing on three social arenas in which signaling might plausibly be important: unconditional generosity, wasteful subsistence behavior, and…
Why Women Hunt: Risk and Contemporary Foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal Community
An old anthropological theory ascribes gender differences in hunter-gatherer subsistence to an economy of scale in household economic production: women pursue child-care-compatible tasks and men, of necessity, provision wives and offspring with hunted meat. This theory explains little about the division of labor among the Australian Martu, where women hunt extensively and gendered asymmetry in foraging decisions is linked to men's and women's dif…
Variability in the organization and size of hunter-gatherer groups: Foragers do not live in small-scale societies
In Pursuit of Mobile Prey: Martu Hunting Strategies and Archaeofaunal Interpretation
By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body siz…
Constraints of knowing or constraints of growing: Fishing and collecting by the children of mer
Aboriginal Burning Regimes and Hunting Strategies in Australia's Western Desert
Children on the reef: Slow learning or strategic foraging
A Landscape Architecture of Fire: Cultural Emergence and Ecological Pyrodiversity in Australia’s Western Desert
Aboriginal foraging systems in Australia's Western Desert have been structured around landscape-burning practices for millennia. These systems are mediated at one end by factors that influence an immediate-return economy and at the other by the way that burning transforms vegetative succession and habitat heterogeneity (pyrodiversity). The distinctive pyrodiversity of anthropogenic landscapes are where Martu insist that they and their estates are…
Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia's Western Desert
Fishing and the Sexual Division of Labor among the Meriam
Do men and women forage differently because they are cooperatively responding to children's requirements for care or because they are differentially sensitive to variance? In this article, I examine how care trade-offs and variance contribute to gender differences in fishing strategies among Torres Strait Islanders (Meriam). Women's fishing had lower failure rates, coefficients of variation, and frequencies of sharing than men's fishing. Men and …
Mass procurement and prey rankings: Insights from the European rabbit
Pyrodiversity and the anthropocene: The Role of Fire in the Broad Spectrum Revolution
The Anthropocene colloquially refers to a global regime of human-caused environmental modification of earth systems associated with profound changes in patterns of human mobility, as well as settlement and resource use compared with prior eras. Some have argued that the processes generating the Anthropocene are mainly associated with population growth and technological innovation, and thus began only in the late Holocene under conditions of dense…
Disturbance, Complexity, Scale: New Approaches to the Study of Human-Environment Interactions
New approaches to human-environment interactions are beginning to move beyond a narrow focus on individuals and simple (patch-level) predatory or competitive interactions. These approaches link nonequilibrium theory from community and landscape ecology with theories of individual decision making from behavioral ecology to explore new ways of approaching complex issues of diachronic change in behavior, subsistence, and social institutions. I provi…
Diesel and damper: Changes in seed use and mobility patterns following contact amongst the Martu of Western Australia
Interpreting abundance indices: Some zooarchaeological implications of Martu foraging
Deconstructing Hunting Returns: Can We Reconstruct and Predict Payoffs from Pursuing Prey
What Explains Differences in Men's and Women's Production: Determinants of Gendered Foraging Inequalities among Martu
Mosaics of fire and water: The co-emergence of anthropogenic landscapes and intensive seed exploitation in the Australian arid zone
In arid Australia, the antiquity, role and ecological contexts of ‘firestick’ farming in seed-based foraging economies remain unclear. We use Landsat imagery to analyse effects of contemporary Martu hunting fires on seed-bearing grasses and forbs. Today, Martu rarely harvest wild seeds but inadvertently foster patches of grass when they burn to hunt burrowing monitor lizards. Therefore, anthropogenic seed patches need only be by-products of fires…
The social significance of subtle signals
Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively: Ethnohistoric Data Reveal the Contexts, Advantages, and Evolutionary Importance of Communal Hunting
We analyze a new ethnographic and ethnohistoric database of quantitative cases (n = 139) and qualitative information on a neglected form of forager subsistence—communal drive hunts (CDHs)—using a human behavioral ecology perspective. Among our key findings are that (i) in specific contexts, CDHs achieve higher return rates or lower odds of failure than encounter hunting; (ii) CDHs increase the rate of success for hunting large ungulates that clus…
Risky Pursuits: Martu Hunting and the Effects of Prey Mobility: Reply to Ugan and Simms
We recently demonstrated that prey size is not a reliable predictor of post-encounter return rates for resources Martu hunters regularly handle in Australia’s Western Desert (Bird et al. 2009). Ugan and Simms are skeptical of our calculations of these returns, especially in our inclusion of tracking as pursuit time. Here we review how these variables were recorded and calculated, update the analysis with more data, and clarify the importance of p…
Cooperation and conflict: The behavioral ecology of the sexual division of labor
When it comes to subsistence, men and women in almost all societies do it differently. One long-standing explanation for this sexual division of labor is that men and women pair up to provision offspring and specialize in subsistence activities in order to maximize household productivity. This model of cooperative parental provisioning has generally been supported by the proposal that both male and female reproductive success is maximized by prov…
The Ethnoarchaeology of Juvenile Foragers: Shellfishing Strategies among Meriam Children
The hunting handicap: Costly signaling in human foraging strategies
Risk and reciprocity in Meriam food sharing
Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work
Zahavi's 1 , 2 handicap principle makes “waste” a common outcome of signal selection because the cost of a signal guarantees its honesty. The capacity to bear the cost reveals the show‐off's hidden qualities. While displays take many forms, some also provide fitness‐related benefits to the audience in addition to information about the show‐off. Zahavi 3 has used the handicap principle to explain both merely wasteful displays and altruistic behavi…
Constraints of knowing or constraints of growing: Fishing and collecting by the children of mer
Children on the reef: Slow learning or strategic foraging
Evolutionary and Ecological Understandings of the Economics of Desert Societies Comparing the Great Basin USA and the Australian Deserts
This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Background Discussion Adaptation: A Key Concept Subsistence Strategies Hypotheses about Subsistence Variability HBE in Desert Australia HBE in the Great Basin Conclusion References
Signaling Theory, Strategic Interaction, and Symbolic Capital
Signaling theory provides an opportunity to integrate an interactive theory of symbolic communication and social benefit with materialist theories of individual strategic action and adaptation. This article examines the potential explanatory value of signaling theory for a variety of anthropological topics, focusing on three social arenas in which signaling might plausibly be important: unconditional generosity, wasteful subsistence behavior, and…
Aboriginal Burning Regimes and Hunting Strategies in Australia's Western Desert
Analogy Versus Behavioral Ecology in the Study of Human Evolution
In a recent critique published in this journal (Ben-Dor, M. & R. Barkai, 2026, Paleolithic dietary flexibility? Methodological considerations in analogy-based reconstructions of Paleolithic energetic returns, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 33, article 47, pp. 1–27), the authors characterize behavioral ecology approaches to the study of foraging efficiency as being fundamentally constrained by their reliance on conventional analogy-ba…
Fishing and the Sexual Division of Labor among the Meriam
Do men and women forage differently because they are cooperatively responding to children's requirements for care or because they are differentially sensitive to variance? In this article, I examine how care trade-offs and variance contribute to gender differences in fishing strategies among Torres Strait Islanders (Meriam). Women's fishing had lower failure rates, coefficients of variation, and frequencies of sharing than men's fishing. Men and …
The “fire stick farming” hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal foraging strategies, biodiversity, and anthropogenic fire mosaics
Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a “resource management” strategy, but no quantitative tests of this hypothesis have ever been conducted. We combine ethnographic observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity. Anthropogenic lands…
Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia's Western Desert
Why Women Hunt: Risk and Contemporary Foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal Community
An old anthropological theory ascribes gender differences in hunter-gatherer subsistence to an economy of scale in household economic production: women pursue child-care-compatible tasks and men, of necessity, provision wives and offspring with hunted meat. This theory explains little about the division of labor among the Australian Martu, where women hunt extensively and gendered asymmetry in foraging decisions is linked to men's and women's dif…
What Explains Differences in Men's and Women's Production: Determinants of Gendered Foraging Inequalities among Martu
In Pursuit of Mobile Prey: Martu Hunting Strategies and Archaeofaunal Interpretation
By integrating foraging models developed in behavioral ecology with measures of variability in faunal remains, zooarchaeological studies have made important contributions toward understanding prehistoric resource use and the dynamic interactions between humans and their prey. However, where archaeological studies are unable to quantify the costs and benefits associated with prey acquisition, they often rely on proxy measures such as prey body siz…
Interpreting abundance indices: Some zooarchaeological implications of Martu foraging
The hierarchy of virtue: Mutualism, altruism and signaling in Martu women's cooperative hunting
Risky Pursuits: Martu Hunting and the Effects of Prey Mobility: Reply to Ugan and Simms
We recently demonstrated that prey size is not a reliable predictor of post-encounter return rates for resources Martu hunters regularly handle in Australia’s Western Desert (Bird et al. 2009). Ugan and Simms are skeptical of our calculations of these returns, especially in our inclusion of tracking as pursuit time. Here we review how these variables were recorded and calculated, update the analysis with more data, and clarify the importance of p…
Megafauna in a continent of small game: Archaeological implications of Martu Camel hunting in Australia's Western Desert
The marginal valuation of fertility
Conservation or Co-evolution? Intermediate Levels of Aboriginal Burning and Hunting Have Positive Effects on Kangaroo Populations in Western Australia
Bush Tucker, Shop Tucker: Production, Consumption, and Diet at an Aboriginal Outstation
Foraging models have rarely been used to address how behavior is altered by the presence of non-foraged foods. Here, choices of store-bought and hunted foods in one Aboriginal community are analyzed. Hunting occurs frequently, but community residents also purchase food from the shop. Increases in the frequency of hunting certain large and small prey are associated with reduced access to food in the shop. Higher-variance hunt types are not associa…
The Sexual Division of Labor
Many evolutionary arguments fossilize a human division of labor as one of man the hunter, and woman the gatherer, with differences in labor arising out of the effectiveness of efficiency. We suggest here that arguments based solely on the efficiency of labor specialization among heterosexual married pairs over‐generalize divisions of labor that are, in reality, much more diverse. Divisions of labor can be based on age, as well as on gender, and a…
Biology (29 works) · Ecology (22 works) · Geography (22 works) · Foraging (19 works) · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation (19 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (17 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (14 works) · Ecology (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Economics (12 works)