ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which experience-based embodied capital, operationalized as skill, and growth-based embodied capital, operationalized as strength, interacts to produce age-specific competency at different foraging activities among children in a multiethnic community in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. It begins with a presentation of alternative theories of the evolution of childhood, and proceeds to a brief review of several recent studies that have tested hypotheses derived from these alternative theories through examining children's activities in traditional societies. The chapter introduces the study of community and describes the data collection and analysis methods. The adult mortality model developed by E. Charnov and extended to humans by N. Blurton Jones, K. Hawkes, and colleagues argues that organisms shift investment at some point from their own growth into producing offspring. The chapter explores the punctuated development model to examine the relative contribution of growth-based and experience-based embodied capital in the development of competency in foraging tasks.
