Emergence and Evolution of Cooperation Under Resource Pressure

We study the influence that resource availability has on cooperation in the context of hunter-gatherer societies. This paper proposes a model based on archaeological and ethnographic research on resource stress episodes, which exposes three different cooperative regimes according to the relationship between resource availability in the environment and population size. The most interesting regime represents moderate survival stress in which individuals coordinate in an evolutionary way to increase the probabilities of survival and reduce the risk of failing to meet the minimum needs for survival. Populations self-organise in an indirect reciprocity system in which the norm that emerges is to share the part of the resource that is not strictly necessary for survival, thereby collectively lowering the chances of starving. Our findings shed further light on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Project CSD2010-00034 (SimulPast CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010) and HAR2009-06996; from the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET): Project PIP-0706; from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research: Project GR7846; and from the project H2020 FET OPEN RIA IBSEN/66272

The behavioural ecology and evolutionary implications of hunter-gatherer social organisation

Much that is remarkable about human behaviour relates in some way to our advanced social cognition. Understanding why this advanced social cognition evolved benefits from an understanding of the kind of social organisation that is promoted by hunting-and-gathering, the dominant mode of subsistence throughout most of human evolutionary history. In this thesis, I explore the social organisation of hunter-gatherers in general and of the Palanan Agta in particular. In chapter four, I present data that demonstrate that, like many small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, the Agta live in small groups of fluid composition in which a large number of unrelated individuals co-reside. I present the results of a model that simulates the process of camp assortment and which suggests that sex equality in residential decision making may serve to constrain group relatedness. In chapter five, I challenge traditional biological conceptions of relatedness, arguing that under conditions of stable pair-bonding, individuals can derive inclusive fitness benefits through aiding affinal kin. In chapter six, I explore multilevel social organisation among the Agta and argue that it serves to provide individuals with access to the range of social relationships required to overcome both short-term variability in foraging returns and long-term energetic deficits resulting from the demands of having an energetically expensive life-history strategy

Hadza Hunter-Gatherers And The Evolution Of Human Cooperation: Evidence Against Partner Choice Models

Human cooperation is exceptional in the animal kingdom, and explaining its evolution is a puzzle. One hypothesis is that the ability to track others’ reputations and to choose our cooperative partners created biological markets, and competition within these markets selected for cooperators. Here, I test this hypothesis from the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the last remaining foraging populations. In Chapter 1, I use longitudinal data tracking cooperation in an economic game and residence patterns. In every year, contribution levels to the public good are similar within residence camps, fulfilling a necessary condition for the evolution of cooperation. However, cooperators in previous years were not more likely to live with cooperators in future years. Further, at the individual level, previous contributions did not predict future contributions. In Chapters 2 and 3, I use data from a ranking task in which Hadza ranked their campmates on character traits, hunting ability, and who they would like to live with in the future. In Chapter 2, I examine whether Hadza agree on perceptions of moral character. The Hadza disagree on which of their campmates exhibit moral character. The Hadza do agree though on what traits (e.g., generosity and hard work) contribute to overall moral character. These results indicate that the Hadza use similar criteria for evaluating moral character but do not agree on who exhibits these traits. The lack of agreement on perceptions of moral character may be due to the lack of stable moral dispositions among the Hadza. Finally, in Chapter 3, I examine which traits the Hadza prefer when choosing potential campmates. I find that the Hadza have only weak preferences to live with campmates that exhibit characters traits, and instead have stronger preferences to live with men who are better hunters. Further, there is no evidence that being a preferred campmate results in any benefits to one’s reproductive success, further undermining partner choice theories. Together, these results indicate that partner choice and other reputation-based strategies do not maintain cooperation among the Hadza, and more broadly, suggests that such mechanisms were not responsible for the evolution of human cooperation

Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard..

'The great transformation' from customary exchange to impersonal markets is incomplete. Reciprocal exchange pervades modern societies. it takes the form of 'gifts,' reciprocated without certainty. Reciprocity is driven by the pursuit of 'regard'. Money is avoided in regard exchanges, because it is impersonal. Instead, regard signals are embodied in goods, in services, or in time (attention). The personalization of gifts authenticates the signal. Reciprocal exchange persists in family formation, in intergenerational transfers, in labor markets, in agriculture, the professions, in marketing, entrepreneurship, and also in corruption and crime. Reciprocal exchange is constrained by the time and psychic energy, but is likely to persist as a preferred source of regard.

Scale Matters

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the pitfalls and potentials of scaling in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The volume brings together scholars from diverse fields, working on different geographical areas and time periods, to engage with scale-conscious questions regarding human sociality, culture, and evolution. With contributions by Nurit Bird-David, Robert L. Kelly, Charlotte Damm, Andreas Maier, Brian Codding, Elspeth Ready, Bram Tucker, Graeme Warren and others

Scale Matters: The Quality of Quantity in Human Culture and Sociality

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the pitfalls and potentials of scaling in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The volume brings together scholars from diverse fields, working on different geographical areas and time periods, to engage with scale-conscious questions regarding human sociality, culture, and evolution. With contributions by Nurit Bird-David, Robert L. Kelly, Charlotte Damm, Andreas Maier, Brian Codding, Elspeth Ready, Bram Tucker, Graeme Warren and others

Social inequality before farming? Multidisciplinary approaches to the study of social organization in prehistoric and ethnographic hunter-gatherer-fisher societies

Archaeological investigations over the past 50 years have challenged the importance of domestication and food production in the emergence of institutionalized social inequality. Social inequality in the prehistoric human past developed through multiple historical processes that operate on a number of different scales of variability (e.g. social, economic, demographic, and environmental). However, in the theoretical and linguistic landscape of social inequality, there is no clear definition of what social inequality is. The lifeways of hunter-gathererfisher societies open a crucial intellectual space and challenge to find meaningful ways of using archaeological and ethnographic data to understand what social inequality exactly is with regard to variously negotiated or enforced cultural norms or ethoses of individual autonomy. This interdisciplinary edited volume gathers together researchers working in the fields of prehistoric archaeology and cultural and evolutionary anthropology. Spanning terminal Pleistocene to Holocene archaeological and ethnographic contexts from across the globe, the nineteen chapters in this volume cover a variety of topics organized around three major themes, which structure the book: 1) social inequality and egalitarianism in extant hunter-gatherer societies; 2) social inequality in Upper Palaeolithic Europe (c. 45,000–11,500 years ago); 3) social inequality in prehistoric Holocene hunter-gatherer-fisher societies globally. Most chapters in this volume provide empirical content with considerations of subsistence ecology, demography, mobility, social networks, technology, children’s enculturation, ritual practice, rock art, dogs, warfare, lethal weaponry, and mortuary behaviour. In addition to providing new data from multiple contexts through space and time, and exploring social diversity and evolution from novel perspectives, the collection of essays in this volume will have a considerable impact on how archaeologists define and theorize pathways both towards and away from inequality within diverse social contexts

Child Helpers: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

This essay was greatly inspired by a 15 film titled Tiny Katerina, which shows glimpses of Katerina from two- to four-and-a-half years of age. She lives with her parents and older brother in Northwestern Siberia in the taiga. The Khanty-speaking people live by foraging (berries, for example), fishing and herding reindeer; they are semi-nomadic. In their camp and the vicinity, there is no evidence of electricity or any other public service. These people are very much “off the grid.” From the first, as a wobbly toddler, Katerina is shown being helpful. She carries (and drops and picks up) firewood chopped by her mother into their tent. She ladles food (spilling some) from a large pot over the fire into a tin and feeds the dog. She carries pans with bread dough to her mother to place in the baking oven. When her mother goes gathering in the forest, Katerina has her own toddler-size collecting bucket. She is out in all weather, including deep snow, keeping warm in her animal skin anorak and mittens

Intensification in pastoralist cereal use coincides with the expansion of trans-regional networks in the Eurasian Steppe

The pace of transmission of domesticated cereals, including millet from China as well as wheat and barley from southwest Asia, throughout the vast pastoralist landscapes of the Eurasian Steppe (ES) is unclear. The rich monumental record of the ES preserves abundant human remains that provide a temporally deep and spatially broad record of pastoralist dietary intake. Calibration of human δ13C and δ15N values against isotope ratios derived from co-occurring livestock distinguish pastoralist consumption of millet from the products of livestock and, in some regions, identify a considerable reliance by pastoralists on C3 crops. We suggest that the adoption of millet was initially sporadic and consumed at low intensities during the Bronze Age, with the low-level consumption of millet possibly taking place in the Minusinsk Basin perhaps as early as the late third millennium cal BC. Starting in the mid-second millennium cal BC, millet consumption intensified dramatically throughout the ES with the exception of both the Mongolian steppe where millet uptake was strongly delayed until the end of first millennium cal BC and the Trans-Urals where instead barley or wheat gained dietary prominence. The emergence of complex, trans-regional political networks likely facilitated the rapid transfer of cultivars across the steppe during the transition to the Iron Age