Abstract:As obligate tool users, humans habitually reconfigure resource distributions on landscapes. Such resource restructuring would have played a nontrivial role in shaping hunter-gatherer mobility decisions and emergent land-use patterns. This paper presents a model of hunter-gatherer mobility in which the habitual deposition of material resources at places on landscapes biases the future mobility decisions of energy-optimizing foragers. Thus foragers effectively construct the environments to which they adapt. With… Show more
“…Humans are intensely social and nearly obligate cooperators; such conditions generate substantial benefits for living in groups that may outweigh the costs of resource competition at lower population densities (17,18,61,62). Allee effects can also occur at the population level, independently of group size, if individuals change environments in ways that improve habitat quality, and these changes are cumulative and positively correlated with population density (63,64). Allee effects can also arise through the way that movement pathways across the landscape concentrate people in space and time, leading to opportunities for trade, marriage, or ritual business (65).…”
In the mid-1950s Western Desert of Australia, Aboriginal populations were in decline as families left for ration depots, cattle stations, and mission settlements. In the context of reduced population density, an ideal free-distribution model predicts landscape use should contract to the most productive habitats, and people should avoid areas that show more signs of extensive prior use. However, ecological or social facilitation due to Allee effects (positive density dependence) would predict that the intensity of past habitat use should correlate positively with habitat use. We analyzed fire footprints and fire mosaics from the accumulation of several years of landscape use visible on a 35,300-km2mosaic of aerial photographs covering much of contemporary Indigenous Martu Native Title Lands imaged between May and August 1953. Structural equation modeling revealed that, consistent with an Allee ideal free distribution, there was a positive relationship between the extent of fire mosaics and the intensity of recent use, and this was consistent across habitats regardless of their quality. Fire mosaics build up in regions with low cost of access to water, high intrinsic food availability, and good access to trade opportunities; these mosaics (constrained by water access during the winter) then draw people back in subsequent years or seasons, largely independent of intrinsic habitat quality. Our results suggest that the positive feedback effects of landscape burning can substantially change the way people value landscapes, affecting mobility and settlement by increasing sedentism and local population density.
“…Humans are intensely social and nearly obligate cooperators; such conditions generate substantial benefits for living in groups that may outweigh the costs of resource competition at lower population densities (17,18,61,62). Allee effects can also occur at the population level, independently of group size, if individuals change environments in ways that improve habitat quality, and these changes are cumulative and positively correlated with population density (63,64). Allee effects can also arise through the way that movement pathways across the landscape concentrate people in space and time, leading to opportunities for trade, marriage, or ritual business (65).…”
In the mid-1950s Western Desert of Australia, Aboriginal populations were in decline as families left for ration depots, cattle stations, and mission settlements. In the context of reduced population density, an ideal free-distribution model predicts landscape use should contract to the most productive habitats, and people should avoid areas that show more signs of extensive prior use. However, ecological or social facilitation due to Allee effects (positive density dependence) would predict that the intensity of past habitat use should correlate positively with habitat use. We analyzed fire footprints and fire mosaics from the accumulation of several years of landscape use visible on a 35,300-km2mosaic of aerial photographs covering much of contemporary Indigenous Martu Native Title Lands imaged between May and August 1953. Structural equation modeling revealed that, consistent with an Allee ideal free distribution, there was a positive relationship between the extent of fire mosaics and the intensity of recent use, and this was consistent across habitats regardless of their quality. Fire mosaics build up in regions with low cost of access to water, high intrinsic food availability, and good access to trade opportunities; these mosaics (constrained by water access during the winter) then draw people back in subsequent years or seasons, largely independent of intrinsic habitat quality. Our results suggest that the positive feedback effects of landscape burning can substantially change the way people value landscapes, affecting mobility and settlement by increasing sedentism and local population density.
“…Figure 1.The working behavioral model considers that hunter-gatherer mobility entails preferential attachment to previously occupied places to realize cost savings in the acquisition and construction of cultural materials and features. An agent-based model shows that such recursive use of landscapes generates extreme, highly skewed variation in site occupation intensity, as seen in this example of simulation run (Haas and Kuhn, 2019). …”
mentioning
confidence: 68%
“…In a recent paper, Haas and Kuhn (2019) articulated an evolutionary model of forager mobility in constructed environments to generate and test expectations for the structure of archaeological settlement patterns. The model considers that basic human modifications to landscapes, including infrastructure construction and material deposition, encourage foragers to return to certain places, which in turn generates runaway accumulation of cultural materials at a few otherwise unexceptional places.…”
Diverse theoretical perspectives suggest that place plays an important role in human behavior. One recent perspective proposes that habitual and recursive use of places among humans may be an emergent property of obligate tool use by our species. In this view, the costs of tool use are reduced by preferential occupation of previously occupied places where cultural materials have been discarded. Here we use the model to generate five predictions for ethnographic mobility patterns. We then test the predictions against observations made during one month of coresidence with a residentially mobile Dukha family in the Mongolian Taiga. We show that (1) there is a strong tendency to occupy previously used camps, (2) previously deposited materials are habitually recycled, (3) reoccupation of places transcends kinship, (4) occupational hiatuses can span decades or longer, and (5) the distribution of occupation intensity among camps is highly skewed such that most camps are not intensively reoccupied whereas a few camps experience extremely high reoccupation intensity. These findings complement previous archaeological findings and support the conclusion that the constructed dimensions of human habitats exert a strong influence on mobility patterns in mobile societies.
“…The conditions for selection of mobility and foraging strategies in these stone-poor, sandy landscapes were altered. The macro-scale patterns that emerge from the re-use of available stone on the landscape constitute a major determinant in the character of the lithic archaeological record 12,51,52 . Here the stones are both the precipitate of the cultural niche construction and part of the ecological inheritance passed on to the offspring.…”
Section: Lithics As Residuals Of Inceptive Perturbationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…To date, most NCT discussions center on the origins of food production 8 , which are the most obvious examples of early human ecosystem engineering on a large scale. Although hunter-gatherers clearly also construct their environments 9 , this leaves subtler material traces, with lithic use in hunter-gatherer niche construction only rarely considered [10][11][12] . Here, we review the ways NCT serves as an explanatory framework in stone artifact archaeology and generates testable hypotheses, while also comparing it to other commonly employed frameworks.…”
Section: Introduction: the Nct Promise For Archaeologymentioning
One of the greatest difficulties with evolutionary approaches in the study of stone tools (lithics) has been finding a mechanism for tying culture and biology in a way that preserves human agency and operates at scales that are visible in the archaeological record. The concept of niche construction, whereby organisms actively construct their environments and change the conditions for selection, could provide a solution to this problem. In this review, we evaluate the utility of niche construction theory (NCT) for stone tool archaeology. We apply NCT to lithics both as part of the ‘extended phenotype’ and as residuals or precipitates of other niche-constructing activities, suggesting ways in which archaeologists can employ niche construction feedbacks to generate testable hypotheses about stone tool use. Finally, we compare NCT to other prominent evolutionary approaches, such as human behavioral ecology and dual-inheritance theory, concluding that NCT has several advantages.
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