Son To Father Reciprocity And Encephalization In Early Humans

John Hartwick

No 1223, Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University

Abstract: Humans exhibit much more sharing of food harvested by prime-age hunter-gatherers with dependents relative to such sharing by lower-order primates. We investigate this behavior in a model in which a father provides generously to his dependent child-son in period t in the hope that this gesture will inspire his son to reciprocate in the next period when the father is in "retirement". In our formulation fathers provide better when (a) they are smarter hunters (b) they have a higher probability of living to experience a "retirement" and (c) when they are more con dent that theirchild-sons will indeed provide generously for them in their "retirement". Better food provision by prime-age fathers is associatedwith brain-size expansion in our model.

Keywords: reciprocity; encephalization; intertemporal division of labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 J12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/qed_wp_1223.pdf First version 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qed:wpaper:1223

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Babcock ().