Remembering Nick Blurton Jones

written by Dr. Kristen Hawkes

photos courtesy of Dr. James O'Connell

[Long-time U of U Anthropology faculy collaborator] Nicholas Blurton Jones died quietly in his sleep the morning of June 8 after a long period of failing health; he was 90. Nick’s enormous contributions to Evolutionary Anthropology began while he was a student of Niko Tinbergen’s in David Lack’s department at Oxford. He saw the ethological tools they were using to explain so much about the evolution and behavioral variation in birds might also explain the evolution and behavioral variation in us humans. Joining the Department of Growth and Development in the Institute of Child Health, University of London, he began studying London children. That led to an invitation from Mel Konner, a member of the Harvard Kalahari Project who was studying children among !Kung speaking hunter-gatherers at Dobe in Botswana. Nick’s visits to Konner in the field resulted in their comparisons of child behavior between London and Dobe. They also ran discussions with !Kung hunters about animal behavior, which captured a persistent pillar of Nick’s many lessons for Evolutionary Anthropology:
“It became evident fairly early in the study that the !Kung were very careful to discriminate data from theory and interpretation, and, even more so, to discriminate observed data from hearsay….In contrast they seem to acquire less from each other than we might expect. … In this respect they have an ability and an approach which is also one of the basic features of the scientific method and which has most sharply distinguished science from other intellectual pursuits. … We found our animal behavior seminars chastening at many levels. The sheer volume of knowledge is breathtaking. … The accuracy of observation, the patience, and the experiences of wildlife they have had and appreciate are enviable. The sheer, elegant logic of deductions from tracks would satiate the most avid crossword fan or reader of detective stories. The objectivity is also enviable to scientists who believe that they can identify it and that the progress of science is totally dependent upon it. … Just as primitive life no longer can be characterized as nasty, brutish, and short, no longer can it be characterized as stupid, ignorant, or superstitiondominated.”¹

Nancy Howell’s field defining Demography of the Dobe !Kung had documented comparatively long birth-spacing. At the time, attribution of birth spacing and other practices to “population regulation” was widely accepted in Human Ecology. As an evolutionary biologist Nick was more than skeptical. Assuming a history of natural selection, variants (tendencies, capacities) whether behavioral, developmental, morphological, or physiological are expected to spread or persist depending on their inclusive fitness effects. He and Richard Sibly, another former student in David Lack’s Oxford department, decided evaluation was in order. The extensive quantitative records compiled by members of the Harvard Kalahari Project especially ethnographer Richard Lee made that possible. Those records included resource acquisition rates, resource nutrient values, time allocation, seasonal patterns, the distance women had to walk to and from the mongongo groves, the load of nuts and baby that mothers had to carry to feed themselves, to support their milk supply, and to support still dependent weaned offspring. Blurton Jones and Sibly’s backload model showed those ecological and demographic requirements set a tradeoff for mothers between birth interval lengths and amounts they could supply to support survival chances of each child. Given that tradeoff a four-year interval maximized likely number of surviving descendants.

When the Thacher years collapsed funding for science in England including Nick’s program at the University of London, Michael MacGuire an influential psychiatrist at UCLA pulled together a joint appointment for him across departments of
Psychiatry, Anthropology, and Education; and Nick joined the UCLA faculty. Since the backload explanation for !Kung birth intervals depended on specific features of Dobe ecology and !Kung behavior, Nick’s persistent pursuit of evolutionarily coherent explanations of human variation prompted a search for hunter-gatherers in a different ecological setting where measuring local ecological and demographic features could evaluate the model’s generality. Nick told a story about meeting Lars Smith in an African airport. Lars, then a student of Irv DeVore’s at Harvard, had been visiting the Hadza. Although he had other plans himself, Lars agreed to introduce Nick. 

When Nick invited me and Jim O’Connell to join him in mounting a long-term project on Hadza evolutionary ecology, we jumped at the chance to explore answers to our own questions about how hunting and gathering works when people know what they’re doing in an east African ecological setting that seemed the best modern analog for the one in which humans evolved. Nick, Jim and I had slightly different guiding questions. Nick’s backload questions were quickly preempted on finding that in contrast to !Kung kids, Hadza kids were active foragers themselves; and he took up the challenge of explaining that contrast. I was still confused by what we’d found with Aché foragers in eastern Paraguay: hunters not supplying resources differentially to their own wives and kids. Obsessed by explaining men’s strategies I had no inkling we’d find  postmenopausal women’s foraging productivity pointing to a central role for ancestral grandmothers in human evolution.

Jim, with his archaeologist’s eye found scavenging big carcasses and the character and distribution of faunal assemblages the easiest to connect to debates about both topics then current in paleoarchaeology.

Our subsequent decades of collaboration have taught us all things we had not imagined and been more productive than we could have hoped. Some of that collaboration was rehearsed in a 2018 paper (Hawkes, O’Connell & Blurton Jones Hunter-gatherer studies & human evolution: A very selective review Am J Phys Anth Centennial Anniversary Issue 165(4): 777-800 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23403 Nick’s 2016 book: Demography and Evolutionary Ecology of Hadza
Hunter-Gatherers http://www.cambridge.org/9781107069824 surely stands as the richest reward to us all, so full of crucial data and thoughtful analyses. To accumulate a sufficient record of births and deaths for his demographic project required Nick spending repeated summers briefly visiting multiple Hadza camps. During the northern summer, mornings come later near the equator. As early risers, we admired Nick’s capacity to sleep through most of them. A toast to his time allocation and especially our great luck in having such a remarkable scientist as a collaborator.

With gratitude for his life, -kristen hawkes

¹ Blurton Jones & Konner (1976) !Kung Knowledge of Animal Behavior (or: The Proper Study of Mankind Is Animals) in RB Lee & I DeVore (Eds) Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers pp 325-348. Cambridge MA.