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Abstract:
Optimality and game-theoretic models grounded in behavioral ecology have enjoyed increasing popularity in anthropology and prehistoric archaeology over the last three to four decades. They have been especially important to prehistorians in fostering the development of comprehensive, theoretically well-grounded expectations about past human behavior and in helping to identify testable explanations for its variation across time and space. Bliege Bird et al. (1) provide an example of this approach in their discussion of two game-theoretic models in an Australian ethnographic context. The results have important implications for reconstructing the process of hunter-gatherer dispersal across Sahul (Pleistocene Australia–New Guinea) and about changes in human subsistence during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene.One of these models describes the ideal free distribution (IFD) of a population as it grows and spreads in an ecologically heterogeneous habitat (2). Applied specifically to hunter-gatherers, it assumes that patches within the habitat contain different sets of plant and animal foods offering different nutrient return rates to potential consumers. The model predicts that incoming population members will first occupy the patch where resources offer the highest aggregate rates, allowing them to gain the best overall return in the time available for collection. If resources are finite, consumers may deplete them. If returns from exploiting them fall below those available in other patches, some consumers will move to those patches. The process may continue until all patches are occupied and return rates across all are equal. It will be accelerated by population growth: Increasing numbers of consumers means more rapid resource depletion and related consumer dispersal across the overall habitat—a negative density-dependent scenario. In some situations, the opposite pattern may be apparent: Consumer presence may increase resource availability, an example of the Allee effect (3). Although the end result may be the same as in a simple IFD, … ↵1Email: oconnell{at}anthro.utah.edu.
