The Social Opportunity Hypothesis

Summary

My work is motivated by the finding that the first farmers of the deserts of Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona formed settlements near and farmed reliable and productive flood plains. To understand why, I investigate to the processes that lead hunters and gatherers to invest in the low-level production of food in general. I use a dynamical systems model to investigate the effect of low-level food production on the ability of foragers to predictably allocate time to reaping the fitness benefits of social opportunities. I propose that there is a social-ecological Goldilocks zone where investment in low-level food production leads to a positive feedback cycle. Multilevel selection dynamics drive the coevolution of foragers and resources into a state of committed food production at the expense of hunting and gathering. Specifically, low-level food production makes the time budgets of individuals more robust to environmental variation at an annual time scale, but leads to population growth at longer time-scales. Population growth eventually feeds back to affect the ability of individuals to maintain a robust time budget. This feedback, in turn, creates an environment in which foragers who adopt more effective food production strategies gain a fitness benefit over foragers who do not.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The Robustness and Vulnerability of Food Production and Social Change: An evaluation of interdisciplinary concepts using archaeological data, models and ethnographic observations

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