1994 年 102 巻 1 号 p. 49-57
One of the goals of ecological anthropology and/or human ecology is to elucidate the long-term survival mechanisms of a human population as a whole. This paper discusses methodological issues, centering on a genealogy-based method for estimating reproduction rates and population increase rates in the past, which I have applied to the Gidra and some other populations in Papua New Guinea. Depending on the sociocultural circumstances of the target populations, the applicability and validity of this method vary; in some cases, these rates can be estimated to a satisfactory degree, and thus contribute from quantifiable evidence to reconstructing a population's ethnohistory and its relationships with diversified and changing environmental conditions on the one hand, and to clarifying gene frequency patterns on the other hand.
