What does prey harvest composition signal to a social audience? Experimental studies with Aché hunter-gatherers of Paraguay

In small-scale societies hunting is a high-risk, high-reward activity which impacts status and reproductive success. The question of whether men hunt to provision families or as a costly signal of their phenotypic qualities has been hotly debated in the anthropological literature. To shed new light on this question, we explored audience assessments of a hunter's phenotypic quality and desirability as a function of the composition of prey acquired by the hunter. A combination of ranking and forced-choice tasks were administered to 52 informants (46% female, aged 15–76 years) from the Aché hunter-gatherer tribe of Paraguay between May and July of 2015. Ratings of a hunter's provisioning ability, strength, fighting ability, disease resistance, and desirability as a mate or ally were all positively associated with killing large and hard-to-kill prey, and negatively associated with killing hard-to-find prey. However, killing a single large animal resulted in a worse assessment of hunter phenotype and desirability than killing an equivalent biomass of small animals. These findings highlight the potential of small prey hunting as a mechanism for advertising both quality and consistent provisioning ability. Critically, no conflict was observed between the goal of advertising quality/desirability and the goal of effective provisioning, since hunters who acquired more meat, even if the source of the meat was small game, were generally perceived as having better phenotypes and as more desirable.