tailieunhanh - PARENTAL INVESTMENT AND CHILD HEALTH IN A YANOMAMÖ VILLAGE SUFFERING SHORT-TERM FOOD STRESS

Poverty and social inequalities in childhood have profound effects on the health of children, and their impact on health continues to reverberate throughout the life course into late adulthood. Globally and historically, poverty has been the major determinant of child and adult health1 and, even in rich nations such as the UK, it remains a major cause of ill health with huge public health consequences. 2 The rapidly growing and developing fetus3 and child4 seem to be particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of poverty providing a further powerful argument for policy initiatives designed to protect children from its. | J. biosoc. Sci. 2001 33 503-528 2001 Cambridge University Press Printed in the United Kingdom PARENTAL INVESTMENT AND CHILD HEALTH IN A YANOMAMỒ VILLAGE SUFFERING SHORT-TERM FOOD STRESS EDWARD H. HAGEN RAYMOND B. HAMESt NATHAN M. CRAIG MATTHEW T. LAUER AND MICHAEL E. PRICE Department of Anthropology University of California Santa Barbara CA 93106 and t Department of Anthropology University of Nebraska-Lincoln USA Summary. The 1998 El Nino significantly reduced garden productivity in the Upper Orinoco region in Venezuela. Consequently parents were forced to allocate food carefully to their children. Nutrition data collected from village children combined with genealogical data allowed the determination of which children suffered most and whether the patterns of food distribution accorded with predictions from parental investment theory. For boys three social variables accounted for over 70 of the variance in subcutaneous fat after controlling for age number of siblings age of the mother s youngest child and whether the mother was the senior or junior co-wife or was married monogamously. These results accord well with parental investment theory. Parents experiencing food stress faced a trade-off between quantity and quality and between investing in younger versus older offspring. In addition boys with access to more paternal investment . no stepmother were better nourished. These variables did not account for any of the variance in female nutrition. Girls nutrition was associated with the size of their patrilineage and the number of non-relatives in the village suggesting that lineage politics may have played a role. An apparent lack of relationship between orphan status and nutrition is also interesting given that orphans suffered high rates of skin flea infections. The large number of orphans being cared for by only two grandparents suggests that grooming time may have been the resource in short supply. Introduction A number of evolution-minded researchers have