Archaeological Perspectives on the Evolution of Forager Cooperation

Habitual cooperation among non-kin is biologically unusual and yet a defining behavior of the human species. Understanding how such altruistic behavior emerges and persists among human populations remains an active and heavily debated area of anthropological and ecological research. While ethnographic forager studies have played a particularly prominent role in the discourse, contributions from prehistoric forager studies remain sparse due to the inherent challenges of studying past populations who left few, taphonomically vulnerable material traces. Nonetheless, because prehistoric foragers were the very individuals who catalyzed and maintained human cooperation for thousands of millennia, the insights to be gained may be particularly salient in advancing evolutionary theories of cooperation. This symposium seeks to identify the diverse ways that archaeological forager research can contribute to the study of human cooperation and to inspire new analytical directions at the intersections of theory, method, and data.