THE EVOLUTIONARY BASIS OF SEX VARIATIONS IN THE USE OF NATURAL-RESOURCES - HUMAN EXAMPLES

People, unlike other primates, regularly consume foods acquired by oth ers. When people forage for a living, women and men customarily acquir e different foods and consume the products of each other's work. This distinctively human ''sexual division of labor'' has seemed the hallma rk of human resource use. If men and women have different economic spe cialties, marriage creates a social unit that deploys their different capacities to serve family needs. Other distinctively human patterns t hen seem to arise from this fundamental economic cooperation between t he sexes. In recent decades, the use of evolutionary theory to investi gate and explain social behavior across the living world has revealed pervasive conflicts of interest between (as well as within) the sexes. Application of these tools to human examples shows the ''sexual divis ion of labor'' to be the economic aspect of different and conflicting reproductive agendas for women and men. A review of some examples from communities where people hunt and gather for a living illustrates tha t families are not units of common economic interest. As with other pr imates, males and females have different reproductive goals and these differences shape sex differences in patterns of resource use.