Mobility and cultural diversity in central-place foragers: Implications for the emergence of modern human behavior

Summary

Although anthropologists have long recognized the importance of mobility to hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies, it remains unclear how mobility affects cultural diversity in subdivided populations. A better understanding of how mobility affects both total diversity and regional differentiation in selectively neutral cultural traits may provide us with an additional line of evidence for explaining the appearance of archaeological indicators of modern human behavior. Here, I introduce a spatially explicit central-place foraging model to investigate how length of the effective foraging radius affects the effective size of a metapopulation composed of central-place foraging groups. Simulation results show emphasizing logistical mobility over residential mobility often inhibits intergroup interaction, which in turn increases the effective size of a subdivided population. Considered within the context of Sewall Wright’s work on the effects of isolation by distance, the findings have interesting implications not only for neutral cultural diversity at the level of the metapopulation but also for cultural differentiation between foraging groups. To the extent that we are able to identify shifts in hominin mobility strategies in the Paleolithic archaeological record, the findings of this study may help us better understand and explain the appearance of modern human behavior.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Evolutionary theory and archaeology, Part I: Cultural transmission, cultural evolution, and evolutionary archaeology

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