Consequences and Context of Stunting in the Bolivian Amazon

Background: Human growth is fundamentally a biocultural process that is best understood through a life-history perspective. The bulk of research on growth patterns in biological anthropology draws on evolutionary life history, which explicitly grapples with how trade-offs between competing domains, such as growth, reproduction, and maintenance, serve to enhance survival and reproduction in dynamic environments. While these lines of research have provided important insights into the adaptive nature of human growth, less research has focused explicitly on how growth patterns may be shaped by local conditions and, by extension, the relationship between early life growth trajectories and downstream health outcomes. In this project, we propose a biocultural model of growth throughout childhood and adolescence that addresses two relatively neglected issues: (1) the lack of multilevel, longitudinal data on the dynamics of human growth in rural settings of low-income nations and (2) research focusing on how local context may shape growth and body composition.