Hunter-Gatherer Social Organisation and Behaviour: Implications for Mental Health.
Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for the vast majority of our species’ history. Therefore, research with contemporary hunter-gatherer societies can offer insight into the evolution of our psychology and physiology. Drawing on my fieldwork with BaYaka hunter-gatherers from Congo, I will discuss the selection pressures that have shaped human social cognition and behaviour. I will focus on the communal living arrangements, egalitarian social organisation, and extensive cooperation, particularly in the domain of childrearing, which are normative across contemporary hunter-gatherer populations. I will also discuss how deviations from these features of sociality, which are commonplace in high-income industrialised societies, may increase our vulnerability to mental health disorders due to evolutionary mismatch—when an organism faces conditions that differ from those that some trait of the organism is adapted to, resulting in pathology or maladaptation.