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It has been suggested recently that systematic infanticide was necessary and widespread among Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Although there is ethnographic evidence which supports that position, a sizable body of relevant negative evidence has received little attention. When all the evidence currently available is examined, it suggests strongly that systematic infanticide was atypical among Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, just as its practice among modern Eskimos and Aboriginal Australians is atypical of present-day human populations.
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Woodrow W. Denham (1974) studied this question.
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