If this blog were Us magazine, we'd say: Hunter-gatherers, we're just like them.
Because seriously, we are.
Here's the story. Humans today live and work in communities with vast numbers of folks we're not related to.
And we often quite happily cooperate and share knowledge with strangers or mere acquaintances. These exchanges allow us to innovate and develop increasingly complex technologies.
And that cooperative behavior, which is fairly unique to humans, may be rooted in the fact that our hunter-gatherer ancestors believed that women and men were equal!
That's the upshot of a new study published this week in Science. A team of anthropologists at University College London interviewed hundreds of couples in two hunter-gatherer tribes, the Palanan Agta of the Philippines and Congo's Mbendjele BaYaka, as well as the Filipino farming tribe the Paranan, which is a patriarchal society.
[For more of this story, written by Thomas K. Grose, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/go...indness-of-strangers]
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