Market Integration Improves Traditional Hadza Male Childhood Health with no Effect on Females

While market integration sometimes benefits one sex or disadvantages the other, its impact on hunter-gatherer populations with subtle pre-existing sex-based dynamics remains understudied. We examined linear enamel hypoplasias, a biomarker of developmental stress in teeth, using time series analysis spanning 40 years in a sample of 81 bush-living Hadza. Results show that Hadza men born after the mid-1970s) experienced less early childhood stress than women and older generations. Few of the traditional explanations for health disparity explained the result, which is counter to most archaeological and contemporary studies of populations in transition. The turning point for men’s childhood health coincided with an increasing supply of tourist goods and currency in the bush, remote market integration. Early and remote integration into the market economy may have had subtle health impacts on health not previously uncovered due to methodological differences and approaches. Remote market economy to bush-living Hadza appears to have disproportionately benefitted men’s early childhood health and may be tied to an external signal of men’s activities having higher value that exacerbated existing sex-based dynamics. The broader implications are that external forces associated with market integration can favor males over females, even in hunter-gatherer societies with traditional sex-based divisions of labor.