Lew-Levy
Biographic Data
| ID | 46258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lew-Levy |
| FAMILY NAME | Lew-Levy |
| SIGNATURE | LEW-LEVY |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1250-6418 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 204 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Meanings and Dividends of Man the Hunter
The phrase Man the Hunter is associated with disparate meanings across communities of scholars, journalists, and the public, which has led to unnecessary scientific disagreement and popular misunderstanding. In this paper, we ask: what does Man the Hunter mean? We distinguish three historical meanings of Man the Hunter. First, in the early-to-mid 20th century, popular writers propagated ideas of human evolution that focused on hunting, men, aggre…
Hunter-Gatherer Children at School
Universal formal education is a major global development goal. Yet hunter-gatherer communities have extremely low participation rates in formal schooling, even in comparison with other marginalized groups. Here, we review the existing literature to identify common challenges faced by hunter-gatherer children in formal education systems in the Global South. We find that hunter-gatherer children are often granted extensive personal autonomy, which …
Fiercely Egalitarian
Globally, there are large disparities in wealth and political decision making power. By contrast, several African hunter-gatherer groups are considered exemplars of material and political egalitarianism. Whilst extant literature has revealed egalitarian maintenance mechanisms specific to individual communities, systematic cross-cultural analysis has been lacking. To better understand how egalitarianism is maintained, such ethnographic comparison …
Construct validity in cross-cultural, developmental research
The recent expansion of cross-cultural research in the social sciences has led to increased discourse on methodological issues involved when studying culturally diverse populations. However, discussions have largely overlooked the challenges of construct validity – ensuring instruments are measuring what they are intended to – in diverse cultural contexts, particularly in developmental research. We contend that cross-cultural developmental resear…
BaYaka forager and Bantu fisher‐farmer adolescent engagement with intensifying market integration in the Republic of the Congo
A substantial body of anthropological research has investigated how subsistence communities engage with market‐based economies. In this study, we contribute to this body of work by examining adolescent orientations towards intensifying market integration in the Congo Basin. Adolescence is characterized by enhanced capacities for abstract reasoning, creative thought, risk‐taking, and exploration. Consequently, this life stage may represent a sensi…
Sustainable education should include Indigenous knowledge
Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real
Research note
We recently conducted a review of the literature regarding hunter-gatherer children’s schooling experiences in the global South (Ninkova et al 2024). In this research note, we highlight one central finding of our review: that the autonomy granted to hunter-gatherer children determines their participation in school. Children decide for themselves whether they will attend. Children also decide for themselves whether they will pursue alternative end…
Dyadic inter-group cooperation in shotgun hunting activities in a Congo Basin village
Understanding the dynamics of inter-group cooperation in human adaptation has been the subject of recent empirical and theoretical studies in evolutionary anthropology, beginning to fill gaps in our knowledge of how interactions across political, economic and social domains can – and often do – lead to stable, large-scale cooperation. Here we investigate dyadic intergroup cooperation in shotgun hunting in the Republic of the Congo. In the Congo B…
Learning to walk in the forest
This paper examines how BaYaka children from the Congo Basin learn to "walk in the forest" (botamboli na ndima). Specifically, after placing forest walking within historical and ethnographic context, we consider how this practice contributes to BaYaka motor, cognitive, and social development, and thus, to the acquisition of culture. To do so, we draw from our own observations and those of other researchers working throughout the region. We outlin…
Mobility, site maintenance and archaeological formation processes
Mobility is considered to play an important role in the way people use their habitual space. Highly mobile societies present a particular challenge to archaeologists as a direct relation is assumed between the duration of occupation and the intensity of its archaeological signature. Here, we present a cross-cultural, ethnoarchaeological study carried out among three contemporary societies that, while showing different patterns of mobility, all li…
Child and adolescent foraging
Young children and adolescents in subsistence societies forage for a wide range of resources. They often target child-specific foods, they can be very successful foragers, and they share their produce widely within and outside of their nuclear family. At the same time, while foraging, they face risky situations and are exposed to diseases that can influence their immune development. However, children's foraging has largely been explained in light…
A roadmap to doing culturally grounded developmental science
This paper provides a roadmap for engaging in cross-cultural, developmental research in practical, ethical, and community-engaged ways. To cultivate the flexibility necessary for conducting cross-cultural research, we structure our roadmap as a series of questions that each research program might consider prior to embarking on cross-cultural examinations in developmental science. Within each topic, we focus on the challenges and opportunities inh…
Associations between men's reputations for fathering and their reproductive success among BaYaka foragers in the Congo Basin
Intergroup Cooperation in Shotgun Hunting Among BaYaka Foragers and Yambe Farmers from the Republic of the Congo
Whereas many evolutionary models emphasize within-group cooperation or between-group competition in explaining human large-scale cooperation, recent work highlights a critical role for intergroup cooperation in human adaptation. Here we investigate intergroup cooperation in the domain of shotgun hunting in northern Republic of the Congo. In the Congo Basin broadly, forest foragers maintain relationships with neighboring farmers based on systems o…
There and back again
BACKGROUND: Leaving "home" to pursue fieldwork is a necessity but also a rite of passage for many biological anthropology/human biology scholars. Field-based scientists prepare for the potential changes to activity patterns, sleep schedules, social interactions, and more that come with going to the field. However, returning from extended fieldwork and the reverse-culture shock, discomforts, and mental shifts that are part of the return process ca…
Toys as Teachers
Studies of cultural transmission—whether approached by archaeological or ethnographic means—have made great strides in identifying formal teaching and learning arrangements, which in turn can be closely aligned with models of social learning. While novices and apprentices are often in focus in such studies, younger children and their engagement with material culture have received less attention. Against the backdrop of a cross-cultural database o…
Links between household and family social dynamics with sleep profiles among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin
Congo Basin youth
Les Jeunes du Bassin du Congo
Cultural Components of Sex Differences in Color Preference
Preferences for pink and blue were tested in children aged 4–11 years in three small-scale societies: Shipibo villages in the Peruvian Amazon, kastom villages in the highlands of Tanna Island, Vanuatu, and BaYaka foragers in the northern Republic of Congo; and compared to children from an Australian global city (total N = 232). No sex differences were found in preference for pink in any of the three societies not influenced by global culture (ds …
Hunter-gatherer children in the past
The Life History of Learning Subsistence Skills among Hadza and BaYaka Foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo
Aspects of human life history and cognition, such as our long childhoods and extensive use of teaching, theoretically evolved to facilitate the acquisition of complex tasks. The present paper empirically examines the relationship between subsistence task difficulty and age of acquisition, rates of teaching, and rates of oblique transmission among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo. We further examine cross-cultural …
Demonstrating the Utility of Egocentric Relational Event Modeling Using Focal Follow Data from Congolese BaYaka Children and Adolescents Engaging in Work and Play
Temporal aspects of child and adolescent time allocation in diverse cultural settings have been difficult to model using conventional statistical techniques. A new statistical approach, Egocentric Relational Event Modelling (EREM), allows for the simultaneous modelling of activity frequency, duration, and sequencing. Here, EREM is applied to a focal follow dataset of Congolese BaYaka forager child and adolescent play and work activities. Results …
BaYaka Adolescent Boys Nominate Accessible Adult Men as Preferred Spear Hunting Models
Humans are selective social learners. In a cultural landscape with many potential models, learners must balance the cost associated with learning from successful models with learning from accessible ones. Using structured interviews, we investigate the model selection biases of Congolese BaYaka adolescent boys learning to hunt with spears (n = 24; mean age [mage] = 15.79 years; range, 12-20 years). Results from social relations models suggest tha…
How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills
Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide tr…
Where innovations flourish
Hunter-gatherer children in the past
The Life History of Learning Subsistence Skills among Hadza and BaYaka Foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo
Aspects of human life history and cognition, such as our long childhoods and extensive use of teaching, theoretically evolved to facilitate the acquisition of complex tasks. The present paper empirically examines the relationship between subsistence task difficulty and age of acquisition, rates of teaching, and rates of oblique transmission among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo. We further examine cross-cultural …
Dimensions of Fatherhood in a Congo Basin Village
Fathers' direct care (e.g., carrying, sensitive caregiving, cultural transmission) can potentially improve children's health, well-being, and social development. However, between- and within-culture variation in fathers' roles in these domains remains understudied, particularly in work on small-scale societies, and we know relatively little about how these roles intersect with indirect paternal care (e.g., provisioning, resource defense) to shape…
Evidence for the Adaptive Learning Function of Work and Work-Themed Play among Aka Forager and Ngandu Farmer Children from the Congo Basin
Work-themed play may allow children to learn complex skills, and ethno-typical and gender-typical behaviors. Thus, play may have made important contributions to the evolution of childhood through the development of embodied capital. Using data from Aka foragers and Ngandu farmer children from the Central African Republic, we ask whether children perform ethno- and gender-typical play and work activities, and whether play prepares children for com…
Socialization, Autonomy, and Cooperation
Across diverse societies, task assignment is a socialization practice that gradually builds children's instrumental skills and integrates them into the flow of daily activities in their community. However, psychosocial tensions can arise when cooperation is demanded from children. Through their compliance or noncompliance, they learn cultural norms and values related to autonomy and obligations to others. Here, we investigate task assignment amon…
BaYaka Adolescent Boys Nominate Accessible Adult Men as Preferred Spear Hunting Models
Humans are selective social learners. In a cultural landscape with many potential models, learners must balance the cost associated with learning from successful models with learning from accessible ones. Using structured interviews, we investigate the model selection biases of Congolese BaYaka adolescent boys learning to hunt with spears (n = 24; mean age [mage] = 15.79 years; range, 12-20 years). Results from social relations models suggest tha…
Universal norm psychology leads to societal diversity in prosocial behaviour and development
Toys as Teachers
Studies of cultural transmission—whether approached by archaeological or ethnographic means—have made great strides in identifying formal teaching and learning arrangements, which in turn can be closely aligned with models of social learning. While novices and apprentices are often in focus in such studies, younger children and their engagement with material culture have received less attention. Against the backdrop of a cross-cultural database o…
Sex differences in daily activity intensity and energy expenditure and their relationship to cortisol among BaYaka foragers from the Congo Basin
OBJECTIVES: The pooling of energetic resources and food sharing have been widely documented among hunter-gatherer societies. Much less is known about how the energetic costs of daily activities are distributed across individuals in such groups, including between women and men. Moreover, the metabolic physiological correlates of those activities and costs are relatively understudied. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Here, we tracked physical activity, energ…
Child and adolescent foraging
Young children and adolescents in subsistence societies forage for a wide range of resources. They often target child-specific foods, they can be very successful foragers, and they share their produce widely within and outside of their nuclear family. At the same time, while foraging, they face risky situations and are exposed to diseases that can influence their immune development. However, children's foraging has largely been explained in light…
Construct validity in cross-cultural, developmental research
The recent expansion of cross-cultural research in the social sciences has led to increased discourse on methodological issues involved when studying culturally diverse populations. However, discussions have largely overlooked the challenges of construct validity – ensuring instruments are measuring what they are intended to – in diverse cultural contexts, particularly in developmental research. We contend that cross-cultural developmental resear…
Intergroup Cooperation in Shotgun Hunting Among BaYaka Foragers and Yambe Farmers from the Republic of the Congo
Whereas many evolutionary models emphasize within-group cooperation or between-group competition in explaining human large-scale cooperation, recent work highlights a critical role for intergroup cooperation in human adaptation. Here we investigate intergroup cooperation in the domain of shotgun hunting in northern Republic of the Congo. In the Congo Basin broadly, forest foragers maintain relationships with neighboring farmers based on systems o…
Links between household and family social dynamics with sleep profiles among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin
Dyadic inter-group cooperation in shotgun hunting activities in a Congo Basin village
Understanding the dynamics of inter-group cooperation in human adaptation has been the subject of recent empirical and theoretical studies in evolutionary anthropology, beginning to fill gaps in our knowledge of how interactions across political, economic and social domains can – and often do – lead to stable, large-scale cooperation. Here we investigate dyadic intergroup cooperation in shotgun hunting in the Republic of the Congo. In the Congo B…
Learning to walk in the forest
This paper examines how BaYaka children from the Congo Basin learn to "walk in the forest" (botamboli na ndima). Specifically, after placing forest walking within historical and ethnographic context, we consider how this practice contributes to BaYaka motor, cognitive, and social development, and thus, to the acquisition of culture. To do so, we draw from our own observations and those of other researchers working throughout the region. We outlin…
Mobility, site maintenance and archaeological formation processes
Mobility is considered to play an important role in the way people use their habitual space. Highly mobile societies present a particular challenge to archaeologists as a direct relation is assumed between the duration of occupation and the intensity of its archaeological signature. Here, we present a cross-cultural, ethnoarchaeological study carried out among three contemporary societies that, while showing different patterns of mobility, all li…
Growing Under an Acacia Tree
Although fieldwork is foundational to socio-cultural anthropology, field methods are rarely incorporated into undergraduate classroom curricula. Drawing on experiences from a semester-long field school in East Africa, we provide a student’s perspective on the importance of fieldwork. We argue that bringing the field into the classroom will work to enrich students’ theoretical understanding, enhance practical skills within and beyond anthropology,…
How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills
Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide tr…
How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Social and Gender Norms? A Meta-Ethnographic Review
Forager societies tend to value egalitarianism, cooperative autonomy, and sharing. Furthermore, foragers exhibit a strong gendered division of labor. However, few studies have employed a cross-cultural approach to understand how forager children learn social and gender norms. To address this gap, we perform a meta-ethnography, which allows for the systematic extraction, synthesis, and comparison of quantitative and qualitative publications. In al…
Dimensions of Fatherhood in a Congo Basin Village
Fathers' direct care (e.g., carrying, sensitive caregiving, cultural transmission) can potentially improve children's health, well-being, and social development. However, between- and within-culture variation in fathers' roles in these domains remains understudied, particularly in work on small-scale societies, and we know relatively little about how these roles intersect with indirect paternal care (e.g., provisioning, resource defense) to shape…
Evidence for the Adaptive Learning Function of Work and Work-Themed Play among Aka Forager and Ngandu Farmer Children from the Congo Basin
Work-themed play may allow children to learn complex skills, and ethno-typical and gender-typical behaviors. Thus, play may have made important contributions to the evolution of childhood through the development of embodied capital. Using data from Aka foragers and Ngandu farmer children from the Central African Republic, we ask whether children perform ethno- and gender-typical play and work activities, and whether play prepares children for com…
Physical activity and time budgets of Hadza forager children
OBJECTIVES: To determine the effects of age and sex on physical activity and time budgets of Hadza children and juveniles, 5-14 years old, including both in-camp and out-of-camp activities. METHODS: Behavioral data were derived from ~15 000 hourly in-camp scan observations of 76 individuals and 13 out-of-camp focal follows on nine individuals. The data were used to estimate energy expended and percentage of time engaged in a variety of routine ac…
Inter- and intra-cultural variation in learning-through-participation among Hadza and BaYaka forager children and adolescents from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo
We examined cross-cultural variation in children’s learning-through-participation in economic work in two forager societies; the Hadza of Tanzania and the BaYaka of the Republic of Congo. We used observational data from 46 Hadza (41% female) and 65 BaYaka (48% female) children and adolescents between the ages of 3 and 18; interview data from 73 Hadza (49% female) and 52 BaYaka (56% female) adults; and ethnographic observations from both populatio…
Universal norm psychology leads to societal diversity in prosocial behaviour and development
Who teaches children to forage? Exploring the primacy of child-to-child teaching among Hadza and BaYaka Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania and Congo
Gender-Typed and Gender-Segregated Play Among Tanzanian Hadza and Congolese BaYaka Hunter-Gatherer Children and Adolescents
Few data exist on gender-typed and gender-segregated play in hunter-gatherer societies, despite their unique demographic and cultural features which may influence children’s gendered play. Using naturalistic observations of Hadza (N = 46, 41% female) and BaYaka (N = 65, 48% female) hunter-gatherer 3- to 18-year-olds from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo, we showed that access to playmates was negatively associated with playing in mixed-gender g…
Fatherhood, egalitarianism, and child health in two small‐scale societies in the Republic of the Congo
OBJECTIVES: The study goals were to (a) characterize the cultural model of fatherhood among the BaYaka, a community of egalitarian foragers in the Republic of the Congo; (b) test if BaYaka fathers' quality in relation to the cultural model predicts their children's energetic status; and (c) compare the variance in BaYaka children's energetic status to that of children of neighboring Bondongo fisher-farmers, among whom there is less cooperative ca…
L’éducation des BaYaka
La scolarisation fait partie d’un effort global visant à aider les peuples autochtones à s’adapter aux changements rapides de leur monde social et écologique et à affirmer leurs droits. La question de savoir si la scolarisation répond à ces objectifs fait l’objet d’un débat permanent parmi les anthropologues et les chercheurs en sciences de l’éducation. Nous examinons dans cet article les avantages et les inconvénients de la pédagogie ORA (Observ…
BaYaka education
Schooling is part of a global effort to help Indigenous peoples adapt to their changing social and ecological worlds and assert their human rights. There is ongoing discussion among anthropologists and educational researchers as to whether schooling meets these goals. Here, we examine the harms and benefits of ORA (Observer, Réflechir, Agir), a school system developed to educate BaYaka children from the northern Republic of the Congo. Many BaYaka…
Sex differences in daily activity intensity and energy expenditure and their relationship to cortisol among BaYaka foragers from the Congo Basin
OBJECTIVES: The pooling of energetic resources and food sharing have been widely documented among hunter-gatherer societies. Much less is known about how the energetic costs of daily activities are distributed across individuals in such groups, including between women and men. Moreover, the metabolic physiological correlates of those activities and costs are relatively understudied. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Here, we tracked physical activity, energ…
Where innovations flourish
Socialization, Autonomy, and Cooperation
Across diverse societies, task assignment is a socialization practice that gradually builds children's instrumental skills and integrates them into the flow of daily activities in their community. However, psychosocial tensions can arise when cooperation is demanded from children. Through their compliance or noncompliance, they learn cultural norms and values related to autonomy and obligations to others. Here, we investigate task assignment amon…
Cultural Components of Sex Differences in Color Preference
Preferences for pink and blue were tested in children aged 4–11 years in three small-scale societies: Shipibo villages in the Peruvian Amazon, kastom villages in the highlands of Tanna Island, Vanuatu, and BaYaka foragers in the northern Republic of Congo; and compared to children from an Australian global city (total N = 232). No sex differences were found in preference for pink in any of the three societies not influenced by global culture (ds …
Hunter-gatherer children in the past
The Life History of Learning Subsistence Skills among Hadza and BaYaka Foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo
Aspects of human life history and cognition, such as our long childhoods and extensive use of teaching, theoretically evolved to facilitate the acquisition of complex tasks. The present paper empirically examines the relationship between subsistence task difficulty and age of acquisition, rates of teaching, and rates of oblique transmission among Hadza and BaYaka foragers from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo. We further examine cross-cultural …
Demonstrating the Utility of Egocentric Relational Event Modeling Using Focal Follow Data from Congolese BaYaka Children and Adolescents Engaging in Work and Play
Temporal aspects of child and adolescent time allocation in diverse cultural settings have been difficult to model using conventional statistical techniques. A new statistical approach, Egocentric Relational Event Modelling (EREM), allows for the simultaneous modelling of activity frequency, duration, and sequencing. Here, EREM is applied to a focal follow dataset of Congolese BaYaka forager child and adolescent play and work activities. Results …
BaYaka Adolescent Boys Nominate Accessible Adult Men as Preferred Spear Hunting Models
Humans are selective social learners. In a cultural landscape with many potential models, learners must balance the cost associated with learning from successful models with learning from accessible ones. Using structured interviews, we investigate the model selection biases of Congolese BaYaka adolescent boys learning to hunt with spears (n = 24; mean age [mage] = 15.79 years; range, 12-20 years). Results from social relations models suggest tha…
There and back again
BACKGROUND: Leaving "home" to pursue fieldwork is a necessity but also a rite of passage for many biological anthropology/human biology scholars. Field-based scientists prepare for the potential changes to activity patterns, sleep schedules, social interactions, and more that come with going to the field. However, returning from extended fieldwork and the reverse-culture shock, discomforts, and mental shifts that are part of the return process ca…
Toys as Teachers
Studies of cultural transmission—whether approached by archaeological or ethnographic means—have made great strides in identifying formal teaching and learning arrangements, which in turn can be closely aligned with models of social learning. While novices and apprentices are often in focus in such studies, younger children and their engagement with material culture have received less attention. Against the backdrop of a cross-cultural database o…
Links between household and family social dynamics with sleep profiles among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin
Congo Basin youth
Sociology (27 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Geography (15 works) · Developmental psychology (11 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (10 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (10 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Primate Behavior and Ecology (10 works)