ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a preliminary effort to use data gathered for demographic study to tackle some of the research questions about childcare. It presents some hypotheses concerning with which people we would expect older men and women to live. The chapter considers cases in which the particular older and the specified younger kin are both alive and recorded in a census. The quantitative data on older women confirm all of the expectations. Hadza move so frequently, and camp compositions are so flexible that we did not hesitate to treat the data as if each census was independent of the other censuses. The data on older women all conformed to ethnographers’ hypotheses, which were based on the assumption that help by older women is effective and is distributed in a way that enhances the older woman's inclusive fitness.