383 Prestige or Provisioning? A Test of Forag- ing Goals among the Hadza Brian M. Wood Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cam- bridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. (bmwood@fas.harvard.edu). 28 IX 05 Tests of hypotheses concerning the foraging goals of Hadza men and women using an interview involving a hypothetical instance of foraging group formation show that most Hadza men and all Hadza women prefer to join foraging groups that ensure the greatest household provisioning advantages. Men with dependent offspring are no more likely to choose a strat- egy beneficial for household provisioning than men without dependent offspring. These results suggest that most Hadza men agree with women’s camp preferences and value family provisioning more than broadcasting signals of their hunting ability when deciding with whom to live. In most human societies that subsist on wild resources, hunt- ing is a male specialization, while women acquire most gath- ered foods (Kelly 1995). Among chimpanzees, hunting is al- most exclusively a male activity (Stanford 2001). A male hunting specialty is probably an ancient characteristic of our species. Much anthropological research has been directed to- ward identifying what selected for and maintained this spe- cialization (e.g., Washburn and Lancaster 1968; Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones 1991; Kaplan et al. 2000; Haw- kes and Bliege Bird 2002). The traditional explanation for this pattern was summa- rized by Washburn and Lancaster (1968), who contended that increased hunting and family provisioning by males led to the evolution of pair bonds and many other social, techno- logical, and cognitive changes in our genus. This interpre- tation and more recent accounts (Kaplan et al. 2000) view men’s hunting and provisioning as important for the evo- lution of many distinctively human traits and portray hunting among foraging populations as a profitable form of family provisioning. Since the late 1960s, several debates have arisen concerning the role of hunting in human evolution. In particular, the family provisioning value of hunting has been questioned (Hawkes 1990, 1991; Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones 2001a). Behavioral ecologists studying forager populations have found that hunting has a higher daily risk of failure than gathering and that meat is transferred away from the ac- quirer’s household to a greater degree than gathered foods (Kaplan and Hill 1985; Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones (2001b). These facts and others are argued to undermine the  2006 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2006/4702-0008$10.00 family provisioning value of hunting. Recently, two alternative explanations that may account for why men hunt have been proposed: the showoff hypothesis (Hawkes 1990, 1991) and a hypothesis based on costly-signaling theory (Smith and Bliege Bird 2000; Bliege Bird, Smith, and Bird 2001). The showoff hypothesis, developed by Hawkes (1990, 1991) using data gathered among the Ache as well as the Hadza, proposes that men’s hunting is best understood as camp pro- visioning that is repaid with social attention including in- creased mating opportunities. In the showoff account, men target large game because it can be shared widely and ex- changed for fitness benefits including mating opportunities. Hadza men are said to pursue the showoff strategy at the expense of more dependable forms of family provisioning such as gathering or the hunting of small game (Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones 1991). The costly-signaling hypothesis, presented by Smith and Bliege Bird (2000), Bliege Bird, Smith, and Bird (2001), and Smith, Bliege Bird, and Bird (2003) using data gathered among Meriam Islanders, draws from signaling theory de- veloped by Zahavi (1975, 1977). This framework proposes that men may be motivated to hunt as a means to broadcast information that is of interest to others. Establishing status as a good hunter is seen as a way for a man to advertise genotypic or phenotypic qualities and promote mutually ben- eficial arrangements. This hypothesis proposes that higher- status hunters display inherent qualities that make them sought as mates, preferred as allies, and avoided as com- petitors. The showoff hypothesis and the costly-signaling hypothesis describe different processes whereby hunting provides fitness benefits to men, 1 but they agree that ethnographically re- corded forms of hunting are poor examples of family pro- visioning (Hawkes 1991; Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones 1991; Bliege Bird, Smith, and Bird 2001). In both ac- counts, hunting is undertaken for mating benefits that accrue to high-status hunters, not for its family provisioning value. In both accounts, men are primarily motivated by the benefits of prestige earned through hunting. In a previous study (Wood and Hill 2000) Ache hunters were presented with a hypothetical scenario of foraging group formation in which their responses reflected a preference for either increased relative hunting status or increased family provisioning. While the study was designed to test a prediction of the showoff hypothesis, it was also an appropriate test of the costly-signaling hypothesis because both accounts propose 1. For discussion of the differences between the two hypotheses, see Smith and Bliege Bird (2000). Recently, Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones (2001a, 2001b) have applied the term “showoff” to actors engaged in costly signaling. While the showoff hypothesis and the costly-signaling hypothesis share some important points of reference (Hawkes and Bliege Bird 2002), they are distinct explanations for men’s work with theoretical differences (Smith and Bliege Bird 2000, 257). The term “showoff” is used here in its original (Hawkes 1990, 1991) meaning.