Hunter–gatherer foraging networks promote information transmission

Abstract

Central-place foraging (CPF), where foragers return to a central location (or home), is a key feature of hunter–gatherer social organization. CPF could have significantly changed hunter–gatherers’ spatial use and mobility, altered social networks and increased opportunities for information-exchange. We evaluated whether CPF patterns facilitate information-transmission and considered the potential roles of environmental conditions, mobility strategies and population sizes. We built an agent-based model of CPF where agents moved according to a simple optimal foraging rule, and could encounter other agents as they moved across the environment. They either foraged close to their home within a given radius or moved the location of their home to new areas. We analysed the interaction networks arising under different conditions and found that, at intermediate levels of environmental heterogeneity and mobility, CPF increased global and local network efficiencies as well as the rate of contagion-based information-transmission. We also found that central-place mobility strategies can further improve information transmission in larger populations. Our findings suggest that the combination of foraging and movement strategies, as well as the environmental conditions that characterized early human societies, may have been a crucial precursor in our species’ unique capacity to innovate, accumulate and rely on complex culture.

Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality

“…Mobile hunter–gatherer societies are extensive multilevel fission–fusion societies characterized by fluid, open composition and movement of individuals and family units among residential groups [ 31 ,– 34 , 46 , 47 ]. Information can move among groups of humans far more rapidly than for other hominoids [ 48 , 49 ]. At some point—a first key set of transitions—hominins were able to interact cooperatively with individuals from other groups, and the portal for the viral flow of cultural information began to open.…”

Human Group Size Puzzle: Why It Is Odd That We Live in Large Societies

“…Did language evolve as a third-party information tool to facilitate larger groups [58][59][60]? Did the structural solutions for macro-network management, like fission-fusion pattern, evolve to facilitate large groups or to facilitate temporal variation in the environment's carrying capacity [61][62][63][64][65]? In particular, is baboon-like fission-fusion dynamic a clue towards the evolution of the ability to form large complex groups in humans, or is this a case for parallel evolution [14,66]?…”

Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter–gatherers over the past 120 000 years

“…In our model, interaction forces are constructed such that agents maintain a minimum distance from each other, in order to avoid the overlap of their foraging areas (i.e. areas regularly used for subsistence activities by their members), as has been reported in the literature [ 12 , 22 , 49 ].…”

“…Note that the mobility process does not describe the mobility of the camp members, but the relocation of the camp position, i.e. 'residential mobility', which is one of the defining features of hunter-gatherers around the world and has been proposed to have important implications for cultural transmission and evolution [12,22,23,[43][44][45]. The demographic changes of the population D(t) are modelled deterministically with population growth and decline depending on the carrying capacity of the landscape as well as the system state Y(t).…”

“…An important body of theoretical [2,8] and experimental [9,10] work has highlighted the role of changes in the size and interconnectedness of populations in determining the persistence, diversity and spatial scale of material culture [6,[10][11][12]. Moreover, predictions derived from these studies have been increasingly used to try to explain historical patterns of cultural changes and even the appearance of modern human behaviour and cumulative culture [13][14][15][16].…”