Mr. Michael Gurven This is Me

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1. 1. www.scienceblog.com

   www.scienceblog.com/cms/old-me - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/5/2008   Last Visited: 8/2/2008

   Shripad Tuljapurkar, the Morrison Professor of Population Studies at Stanford; Puleston; and Michael Gurven, an assistant professor of anthropology at UCSB, co-authored the study in an effort to understand why humans don't die when female reproduction ends.

2. 2. inkycircus: creature feature

   www.inkycircus.com/jargon/crea - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/7/2005   Last Visited: 8/18/2006

   The economics of feeding govern teen growth spurts, explains Michael Gurven, an anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, in ABC News:
   
   "The human strategy is to stay small as long as possible and then shoot up and get big just before you're about to be useful," Gurven said."It's good economics."...

3. 3. ABC News: Study: Teen Growth Spurt Helps Moms

   www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/ - [Cached]

   Published on: 1/5/2006   Last Visited: 1/6/2006

   And, as we know, a teenager can eat you out of house and home," said Michael Gurven, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara."The irony is it would be even more difficult if our children grew like primates."
   
   Chimpanzees, which are believed to be humans' closest ancestral relative, grow at a steady rate.Human babies, meanwhile, stay fairly small until adolescence when they quickly shoot up in size.In a recent report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Gurven examined two hunter-gatherer societies in Paraguay and Botswana to show how this comparatively slower rate of growth lessens the load for parents since smaller children means smaller bellies to feed.
   
   Childhood: A Human Phenomenon
   
   Gurven, who worked with Robert Walker of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, used past studies to calculate how much the children of the two foraging groups of people would eat if they grew as chimps did.
   ...
   "The human strategy is to stay small as long as possible and then shoot up and get big just before you're about to be useful," Gurven said."It's good economics."
   
   He points out that chimpanzees get bigger sooner because their foraging skills aren't as advanced so a 4-year-old chimp can learn to be mostly self-sufficient.
   ...
   Gurven also suspects that babies and children of Western societies may be getting bigger in height and weight as food resources are in abundance.One obvious example is the 14-pound, 3-ounce baby born to an Oklahoma woman last month.
   
   That said, one thing appears to have remained consistent within humans , teenagers still grow fast.
   
   "Kids in Western cultures still hit that growth spurt in their teens," Gurven said.