LA JOLLA — Social networking
isn’t something that came into vogue with Facebook. It goes
back to before the invention of agriculture, say UC San Diego
and Harvard researchers, who base their findings on the study
of Hadza, a tiny group of people who live in the remote Lake
Eyasi region of Tanzania.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, says the
Hadza, who now number fewer than 1,000, practice forms of
cooperation with friends and nonrelatives that are likely very
similar to what happened thousands of years ago.
In a summary of the field research, UC San Diego says
scientists from Harvard “asked Hadza adults to identify
individuals they would prefer to live with in their next
encampment.”
Second, they gave each adult three straws of honey and told
them they could give the straws as gifts to anyone in their
camp. This generated 1,263 campmate ties and 426 gift ties.
“In a separate activity, the researchers measured levels of
cooperation by giving the Hadza additional honey straws that
they could either keep for themselves or donate to the group.
“When the networks were mapped and analyzed, the researchers
found that cooperators and non-cooperators formed distinct
clusters.
“The researchers also measured the connectedness of people with
similar height, age, handgrip strength, etc., and other
characteristics, such as food preference. They also analyzed
the transitivity of friendship — the likelihood that one’s
friends are friends with one another, and other network
properties.
“The structure and dynamics of the Hadza hunter-gatherer social
networks were essentially indistinguishable from existing
social network data drawn from modern communities,” the summary
says.
GARY ROBBINS • U-T