UD professor, scholar document culture of Peruvian community
As the elders of a small hunter-gatherer community told the story of how their people came to be, University of Delaware assistant professor of art Jonathan Cox and Summer Scholar Sarah Driver sat and listened, intrigued by the tale.
Over the course of seven days, they learned firsthand about the Ese’eja (ess-a-eha) Nation, a community of three distinct villages living in the remote areas of Infierno, Palma Real and Sonene, Peru. (more…)
Taking in too many calories far outweighs getting too little exercise as a cause of obesity, according to a study of a hunter-gatherer society co- authored by Yale anthropologist Brian Wood and recently published in the July issue of the journal PLoS One.
Using state-of-the-art technology to measure the daily energetic expenditure of the Hazda, a foraging people of Tanzania, Wood and co-authors Herman Pontzer (Hunter College) and David Raichlen (University of Arizona) discovered that even though these last remaining hunter-gatherers in Africa are quite physically active, they expend on average no more calories in a day than the adult population of the industrialized world. Given the total lack of obesity among the Hadza, whose average daily calorie consumption is far lower than that found in the developed world, the researchers concluded that increased caloric intake is the main source of rising obesity in Western populations. (more…)
