Brian Wood: University of California, Los Angeles

Humans think about, explore, and use landscapes like no other species, reflecting our unique biological and cultural adaptations. One of these adaptations, observed in all hunter-gatherer societies, is a gendered division of foraging labor. The impacts that gendered economic roles have upon space use is a critical concern for evolutionary accounts of social organization and spatial cognition, but is not well understood. Behavioral ecology models propose that the rarity and mobility of targeted resources should predict movement patterns, and that strong gender differences in space use should emerge in a hunting and gathering context, owing to the different kinds of foods that men and women target. To test these ideas, I examine space use among the Hadza, recorded using GPS devices over 2,078 person-days of observation. In this talk, I will also present measures of spatial cognition, and examine correspondences between measures of cognition and spatial behavior.