Dr. Abigail Page is a biological anthropologist at Brunel University London who spent a lot of time researching the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines. She has published some very interesting work on the role of multi-age playgroups as an important form of substitute childcare for Agta mothers, a finding that represented a bit of a paradigm shift in the field, since most prior research focused on the role of grandmothers and fathers.
She has also done some fascinating research on how fertility patterns change when groups move from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to a more settled agriculture lifestyle—a topic I am keenly interested in.
In this episode, we will be covering both of those topics.
I cite Dr. Page’s work often in my writing, so it was a real honor to hear her perspective. She definitely challenged me a bit on some of my interpretations of the hunter-gatherer literature. Page, as you will see, is actually not a fan of the concept of evolutionary mismatch, contrary to other academics I have had on the show, like Dr. Nikhil Chaudhary of Cambridge. And while I generally tend to line up more with Chaudhary’s perspective, I loved hearing Page’s thoughts.
A lot of my work seeks to explain why modern motherhood is so hard, but Page is right that hunter-gatherer motherhood is also incredibly hard, perhaps in different ways, and there can be this strange reverse pressure on mothers to do things the “hunter-gatherer way” when we frame it as the evolutionary norm. Page’s perspective, shared by many in the field, is “but what is natural anyway?” There is too much diversity across human hunter-gatherer societies for us to be able to build a reliable archetype. Maybe she’s right. I’ll let you be the judge!
