SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Tanzania's Hadza Group Sheds Light on Ancient Social Networks
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Long before Facebook made it possible to share photos of your breakfast with hundreds of
friends and let them know just how you feel about your latest parking ticket, humans were forming
social networks with essentially the same structure people use today.
A team of researchers has mapped out the relationships among a remote group of 205
hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who live as humans did about 10,000 years ago and found that their
social networks are very much like ours, even in the absence of the complicating factors of
megacities, cellphones and the Internet.
The researchers found that individuals who are willing to cooperate prefer the company of
other cooperative people and that free riders tend to stick to their own kind as well. The
results appear in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
Read more...
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