At a remote Kubo community, in the interior lowlands of Papua New Guinea, access to sago palms was influenced by rights to the land on which the palms grew and kinship was the primary determinant of the composition of sago-processing work groups. An outcome of these patterns was that women with stronger connections to local land produced more sago flour than did other resident women. It is suggested that, among Kubo, a failure to generalise the usufruct arose because residents who were not owners of local land did not routinely ask for access to palms despite the fact that their requests would have been granted. These residents, however, shared equally in the flour produced by owners and, in quantitative terms, appeared to be “free riding” on the productive efforts of the latter. An explanation of this behaviour is proposed in terms of “tit-for-tat” reciprocity.

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The incidence of nonmetric cranial traits in the Pre-Columbian Peruvians from the Chancay site was examined, and their affinities with several Mongoloids, in particular with the other American Indians were determined by comparison of nonmetric data. Distance analyses based on the MMDs demonstrated that in company with the Ontario Iroquois and the Chicama, the Chancay form a cluster of the native American Indians, which is the most distant from the cluster of the Jomon and Ainu. Also, the analyses showed that the Chancay have a closer affinity with the Ontario Iroquois, a North American Indian, rather than with the Chicama, another Peruvian. This may suggest that among the American Indians, morphological differentiation of nonmetric traits does not coincide with geographical distance between the archaeological sites.

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The clarification of parameters to determine the walking pattern is important for the understanding of the walking mechanism. Infants walk with different postures from adults, and the dynamic characteristics in infants differ from those in adults. It is possible for the “walking posture” to provide a set of the parameters which determine the walking pattern. This study examines the influence of walking postures on the external forces for adult subjects and tests the existence of a relationship between the walking posture and the external forces. 20 subjects, aged 18 to 22, walked with normal posture, forward-inclined trunk and backward-inclined trunk, other 16 subjects walked with normal posture, flexed knees and stiff knees, other 20 subjects walked with normal posture, open legs and closed legs. The results of the comparison between normal posture and the other postures show that the differences in walking posture influence the external forces. We are confident that there are causal relationships between the walking posture and the external forces.

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