On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, Andre' Briend <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> As a newcomer to this mailing list, I am surprised to find hardly any
> reference to problems of infant child feeding in the archives of the forum.
> Is this debated elsewhere? Or did I miss some important reference or book
> on the subject, which would illuminate me? (I do not know how to search
> through the anthropological litterature).
>
> Anybody interested in sharing ideas on this topic?

The first book to read is

Breastfeeding: biocultural perspectives (ed. P. Stuart-Macadam and K. A.
Dettwyler), Aldine de Gruyter. 1995.

which includes chapters on breastfeeding in prehistory and a comparative
study of primate weaning ages.

There is one study comparing prehistoric agriculturalists and
hunter-gatherers (1) which showed that there was no difference in the age
of weaning, contrary to the hypothesis that the introduction of gruels
enabled earlier weaning and therefore contributed to increased birth rates
in agriculturalist societies.  But this is the only prehistoric
hunter-gatherer population on which we have data on the age of weaning.
Our techniques for determining age of weaning are still not good enough to
say very much about the actual ages (2).  Bearing this in mind, the
present data suggest that hunter-gatherer weaning occurred at similar ages
to agriculturalist weaning.  Ethnographic evidence (summarised in the book
cited above) suggests that babies were fed with pre-chewed adult food.

Andrew

(1) Fogel M. L., Tuross N., Johnson B. J. and Miller G. (1997)
Biogeochemical record of ancient humans.  Org. Geochem. 27, 275-287.

(2) Millard AR (in press, 2000) A model for the effect of weaning on
nitrogen isotope ratios in humans, pp. 51-59 in Goodfriend GA, Collins MJ,
Fogel ML, Macko SA, & Wehmiller JF (eds)  Perspectives on amino-acid and
protein geochemistry. New York, Oxford University Press.



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 Dr. Andrew Millard                              [log in to unmask]
 Department of Archaeology, University of Durham,   Tel: +44 191 374 4757
 South Road, Durham. DH1 3LE. United Kingdom.       Fax: +44 191 374 3619
                      http://www.dur.ac.uk/~drk0arm/
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