Lee & DeVore's famous Man the Hunter is often summarized as showing that most calories come from gathering, not hunting, that most gathering is done by females, and that hunter-gatherers need spend only a relatively small part of their time in gathering.
Taken together, these facts imply that a woman can feed her family with little male assistance. This suggests that males would leave more descendants by focusing their efforts on mating rather than on provisioning.*(2)
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Although Man The Hunter is usually cited as showing that hunter-gatherers can feed themselves with a short work day, this appears true only of the tropical peoples discussed. That book also contains Balikci's (1968, p. 82) discussion of the Netsilik Eskimos, who had a 10% loss of
life from starvation in two years. The inland Eskimos appear to be able to support only one family per male (Alexander et al., 1979). Other northern hunter-gatherers such as the Ainu appear to have monogamy as the typical pattern, even if a few males have more than one wife.
The above suggests personality & behavior differences among modern populations should be correlated with the winter temperatures where they evolved. Tropical populations would be selected for greater mating efforts & lower paternal investment. In cold climates, the opposite
tropical environments, such as that of Africa, are ones where hunter-gatherer populations are described by Woodburn (1980) as "immediate gratification" ones. He has described how for the Hadza of Tanzania, food is available in the bush at any time, and that as a result there
is little need to plan ahead or to defer gratification. Thus, it is plausible that the immediate gratification behaviors that Banfield blames for so many inner city problems may be a continuation of tropical hunter-gatherer behavior.
Differences in selection for provisioning versus mating may explain other cultural regularities, such as the association between father-absence and aggression or crime (Whiting, 1965; Bacon, Child, & Barry, 1963). Draper & Harpending (1987, p. 349) have stated "father present
societies are those where most males act like dads and father absent societies are those where most males act like cads," and have described other characteristics of the two types of societies. For instance, father absent societies are associated with local raiding and warfare,
hostile relations between men and women, higher level of male violence, male public bombast oratory and rhetoric, transient bonding between males and females, less male direct provisioning, and women devaluing the male paternal role.
Offspring survival in cold climates requires provisioning by male hunters, while it is not critical in warm climates. Thus, the optimal male tradeoff between seeking copulations and provisioning depends on the climate. Hence, the colder the climate a population evolved in, the
more they should have evolved drives that lead to provisioning (altruism, sexual restraint, rule following behavior) while in tropical areas the drives should have evolved towards competing for mating opportunities (which implies dominance seeking, aggression, high masculinity,
extraversion etc.). This can explain many of the observed differences between the major races. While cultural explanations exist for many of the behavioral differences, they are unable to explain such differences as body build, genital length, muscle structure, bone structure,
the size of the liver, testosterone levels, and monoamine oxidase levels, all of which are explained by the paternal investment versus mating success theory.
