Abstract
The acknowledged success of earlyHomohas generally been thought to reflect male‐dominated provisioning and associated patterns of co‐operative social organization; recently, however, such conclusions have been challenged with the argument that post‐menopausal females, instead, played a significant role in early human subsistence activities; males, it has been proposed, had a very minor role in food acquisition in earlyHomo. The fossil record, however, indicates minimal old‐age survivorship of either sex and heavy young adult mortality, a pattern which is also seen in larger prehistoric and ethnographic samples. Heavy young adult mortality, when combined with characteristically slow maturation, represents a paradox which humans have solved through new reproductive strategies (early weaning and alloparenting) and new life history stages (childhood and adolescence). Stone tools, when used to acquire marrow and brain tissue to feed needful youngsters, may also have been among the strategies developed in response to frequent early parental death.
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