Even today, a Hadza camp quickly challenges the idea that highly mobile foragers can only care for a few children. Other ideas are challenged too. Hadza children are far from helpless, gathering and processing significant amounts of food for themselves (Photographs 7.1, 7.2, 7.3), and although they are very small by western standards, babies and toddlers are usually quite fat. The children are lively, independent, curious, and often noisy. Was Cooper misled by an unusual camp, or an exceptional year? How many children are there really? In later chapters, I will examine how many children a woman keeps alive, who helps her keep them alive, and how well or poorly they grow. Here I am concerned with how many children a woman bears, and at what age she begins and ends her childbearing career. Non-anthropologists often assume that forager women would mature and begin childbearing very early in life. The !Kung and Ache studies show this is not necessarily true. However, Migliano et al. (2007) and Kramer (2008) show that some other forager populations have lower maternal ages at first birth than the Ache and !Kung. What do the data say about the Hadza?

I report the statistical parameters commonly used to describe fertility: age-specific fertility (ASF, births/woman/yr), marital fertility, total fertility rate (TFR, the sum of ASF from age 14 to 45), completed family size (CFS, the mean number of previous births reported by women aged 45 and older), gross reproductive rate (GRR) (total female births/woman), average age at first birth and last birth, sex ratio at birth, primary and secondary sterility, and differences between male and female patterns of fertility. I compare the results with those of Dyson (1977) to look for secular changes in Hadza fertility over the last few decades. I try to give some perspective on the results by comparing them with other populations, particularly the Ache and the !Kung.

The main analyses are based on interviews of women of childbearing age. Older women seemed to be unreliable informants, particularly prone to omit infant deaths.