Examining the Trade-Off between Food Acquisition and Violence Avoidance: Population-Level Effects and Variability in Risk-Preference

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Resource procurement and the avoidance of interpersonal violence are critical features of human survival strategies. Yet these features are often competing, requiring individuals to make trade-offs in order to maximize fitness. Recent decades of research have shown violence to be a pervasive, albeit variable, feature of the human career. Frequently high levels of violence raise the inevitable question as to what behavioral adaptations have evolved to reduce violence risk (VR), and at what cost? In the following presentation we outline a risk-sensitive patch-choice model that formulates expectations for the optimal patch choice. The model predicts that a patch will be avoided when the risk-effect reduces energetic returns below that of than an alternative patch, or that a patch will be utilized at a lower efficiency when the risk-effect does not reduce energetic returns below alternative patches. Further, a risk-averse individual accepts reduced energetic efficiency in order to minimize VR, while a risk-prone individual continues to maximize energetics by accepting a higher VR. We test these predictions using human skeletal and stable isotope data and from a prehispanic population of agropastoralists from highland Peru.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Life Is Risky: Human Behavioral Ecological Approaches to Variable Outcomes

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32794