Fun with Science Club®


			Children forage differently than adults. Beth Tyler 05.18.01 In the United States and other Western countries, foraging often means going to the grocery store. In many cultures, however, people hunt and search for food every day. Both children and adults forage, and their foraging strategies are different. Anthropologists Douglas Bird and Rebecca Bliege Bird wanted to know why children forage differently than adults. They hypothesized that the foraging differences resulted from children being smaller and slower than adults. To test their hypothesis, they made systematic observations of Meriam children and adults foraging. Meriam people live in the Southern Hemisphere on three islands just north of Australia. Because they live near the ocean, they catch and eat shellfish. The anthropologists followed 35 Meriam children and 47 adults while they foraged. They recorded the time they spent traveling and searching, along with their distance and walking speed . They also recorded and weighed the food that each person collected. In analyzing their data, Drs. Bird and Bliege Bird discovered that foraging children walk slower and cover less distance than adults. Because of this, children do not come across the most desired shellfish (in the genus Hippopus) as often as adults. To compensate, the children collect other kinds of shellfish, including shellfish that the adults rarely collect. The children also collect smaller shellfish than the adults because of their smaller size. These results supported the anthropologists’ hypothesis that age-linked foraging differences result from children being smaller and slower than adults.


			Bird, Douglas W., and Rebecca Bliege Bird. 2000. The ethnoarchaeology of juvenile foragers: shellfishing strategies among Meriam children. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19: 461-476.