Report from the Presidents

Dear EAS Members,

We hope that you are all managing to find some peace and balance in these challenging times. So much has changed since our last newsletter in February.

The EAS board has met several times to discuss ways that we can respond as a society to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month you should have received an email that EAS signed on to, in conjunction with the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) and the European Human Behavior and Evolution Association (EHBEA). In that email we called for our members to think about ways that they could engage with the communities they work with, in conjunction with local and national entities where possible, to pass on information about the pandemic and how to prevent transmission of the disease. We appreciate that our members may be variably comfortable with taking on such work. Some may have pre-established relationships with public health organizations or government ministries and can work through them. Others of us may not have these collaborations in place, but might use this situation as an opportunity to think about building such links. We are not advocating any particular strategy, just encouraging our members to think about these issues as they pertain to the communities they work with.

A second focus of our meetings was to discuss the ways in which COVID-related restrictions are impacting our research and scholarship, particularly for students, post-docs and junior scholars who may have been displaced from pursuing or continuing their field work, or do not have long-term datasets to draw upon to continue their research. In order to think about ways to lessen the impact of these disruptions, we are planning a Zoom meeting for interested parties to share suggestions and strategize ways that we as a society can help to bring parties together and facilitate collaborative relationships. Therefore, we encourage both junior and senior colleagues to attend. If you are interested, please RSVP to me (Brooke) by responding to this email and we will send you a link to the Zoom meeting (planned for sometime in late May).

Finally, we discussed how conference cancellations have impacted our plans for the future of EAS. Our previous plan was to have an EAS sponsored event at the AAPA meetings in Los Angeles last month. The goal of this gathering was to bring together current EAS members who attend HBA/AAPA and to draw in potential new members and hear their thoughts (informally) about EAS joining them. Given the cancellation of AAPA, our next opportunity to get together as a group will be at the AAA meetings in St. Louis. We had a number of exciting talks submitted and look forward to a full slate of EAS sessions this year. Between now and then, we will continue to reach out to officers at AAPA to gain a fuller understanding of what an EAS/AAPA hybrid could look like and will report on these meetings at our business meeting in the fall.

Speaking of AAA, if you have not yet submitted your abstract, the deadline to do so has been extended to May 15th. If you did not submit an abstract to EAS you can still submit your abstract directly to AAA and mark EAS as the section you would like to review it. We encourage you to submit abstracts in the next two weeks, and we look forward to seeing you all in St. Louis (hopefully in person!).

Sincerely,

Brooke Scelza (President)

Karen Kramer (President-Elect)

Mary Shenk (Past President)

Recruitment

New degree in Human Biology at Washington State University

New study on Pregnancy & Birth during COVID-19 Pandemic recruiting participants at the University of Illinois-Chicago

NSF is looking for a new program director in Geography/Anthropology

Dr. Melanie Martin is organizing a session at the next AAA meetings on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on graduate students. Graduate students are invited to contact her if interested at martinm7@uw.edu

Recent Member Publications

Comparative Study of Territoriality across Forager Societies By: Mark Moritz, Shane Scaggs, Craig Shapiro, & Sarah Hinkelman

Inequality in the household and rural–urban migration in Ethiopian farmers By: Lucie Clech, James Holland Jones, & Mhairi Gibson

Beyond the group: how food, mates, and group size influence intergroup encounters in wild bonobos By: Stefano Lucchesi, Leveda Cheng, Karline Janmaat, Roger Mundry, Anne Pisor, Martin Surbeck

Cultural taxonomies in the Paleolithic—Old questions, novel perspectives By:Felix Riede ,Astolfo G.M. Araujo ,Michael C. Barton ,Knut, Andreas Bergsvik , Huw S. Groucutt , Shumon T. Hussain , Javier Fernandez‐Lopez de Pablo ,Andreas Maier ,Ben Marwick ,Lydia Pyne ,Kathryn Ranhorn ,Natasha Reynolds ,Julien Riel‐Salvatore,Florian Sauer ,Kamil Serwatka and Annabell Zander

WEIRD bodies: mismatch, medicine and missing diversity By: Michael Gurven and Daniel Lieberman

Environmental stress and human life history strategy development in rural and peri-urban South India By: George B. Richardson, Caitlyn Placek, Vijaya Srinvas, Poornima Jayakrishna, Robert Quinlan, Purnima Madhivanan.

To the hunter go the spoils? No evidence of nutritional benefit to being or marrying a well‐reputed Hadza hunter Duncan N. E. Stibbard‐Hawkes, Robert D. Attenborough, Ibrahim A. Mabulla, Frank W. Marlowe

Herding Friends in Similarity-Based Architecture of Social Networks By: Tamas David-Barrett

Mother’s social status is associated with child health in a horticulturalist population By:Sarah Alami, Christopher von Rueden, Edmond Seabright, Thomas S. Kraft, Aaron D. Blackwell, Jonathan Stieglitz, Hillard Kaplan and Michael Gurven

Cultural and reproductive success and the causes of war: A Yanomamö perspective By: Raymond Hames

Why men invest in non-biological offspring: paternal care and paternity confidence among Himba pastoralists By: Sean P. Prall and Brooke A. Scelza

Hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality accelerates cumulative cultural evolution By: Andrea B. Migliano,Federico Battiston,Sylvain Viguier,Abigail E. Page,Mark Dyble,Rodolph Schlaepfer, Daniel Smith, Leonora Astete, Marilyn Ngales, Jesus Gomez-Gardenes,Vito Latora and Lucio Vinicius

High rate of extrapair paternity in a human population demonstrates diversity in human reproductive strategies By: B. A. Scelza, S. P. Prall, N. Swinford, S. Gopalan, E. G. Atkinson, R. McElreath, J. Sheehama, B. M. Henn

Other Publications

Expanding the evolutionary explanations for sex differences in the human skeleton By: Holly M. Dunsworth

Identity, Kindship, & the Evolution of Cooperation By: Burton Voorhees, Dwight Read, and Liane Gabora

Other Media and Resources

Doing fieldwork in a pandemic

Human Evolutionary Demography Volume (Open Access on OSF) Contributors: Rebecca Sear and Oskar Burger

Can’t I please just visit just one friend? By: Goodreau SM, Pollock ED, Birnbaum JK, Hamilton DT, Morris M, on behalf of the UW Network Modeling Group

New NSF Guidance on effects of COVID-19 on Human Subjects Research

R4DS Online Learning Community on Slack

Dr Jamie Jones was awarded an NSF grant to study the relationship between the contagion dynamics of COVID-19 and related behavioral responses.

Dr. Raymond Hames was elected to the National Academy of Sciences

Sausage of Science podcast with Dr. Aaron Blackwell: Unpacking the Black Boxes of Neurophysiology and Inheritance.

Melanie Martin, Dan Eisenberg, and Ellie Brindle along with colleagues at Washington State University, University of Idaho, and Tulane were awarded NSF Rapid to investigate SARS-CoV-2 infant transmission and immune responses related to breastfeeding.