Suchergebnisse

"Foraging persists as a viable economic strategy both in remote regions and within the bounds of developed nation-states. Given the economic alternatives available, why do some groups choose to maintain their hunting and gathering lifeways? Through a series of detailed case studies, the contributors to this volume examine the decisions made by modern-day foragers to sustain a predominantly hunting and gathering way of life. What becomes clear is that hunter-gatherers continue to forage because the economic benefits of doing so are high relative to the local alternatives and, perhaps more importantly, because the social costs of not foraging are prohibitive; in other words, hunter-gatherers value the social networks built through foraging and sharing more than the potential marginal gains of a new means of subsistence. Why Forage? shows that hunting and gathering continues to be a viable and vibrant way of life even in the twenty-first century."

Abstract
As homicide rates spike across the United States, researchers nominate diverse causes such as temperature, city greenness, structural racism, inequality, poverty and more. While variation in homicide rates clearly results from multiple causes, many correlation studies lack the systematic theory needed to identify the underlying factors that structure individual motivations. Building on pioneering work in evolutionary human sciences, we propose that when resources are unequally distributed, individuals may have incentives to undertake high-risk activities, including lethal violence, in order to secure material and social capital. Here we evaluate this theory by analysing federal data on homicide rates, poverty and income inequality across all 50 US states for the years 1990, 2000 and 2005–2020. Supporting predictions derived from evolutionary social sciences, we find that the interaction of poverty (scarcity) and inequality (unequal distribution) best explains variation in US homicide rates. Results suggest that the increase in homicide rates during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic are driven in part by these same underlying causes that structure homicide rates across the US over the last 30 years. We suggest that these results provide compelling evidence to expand strategies for reducing homicide rates by dismantling structures that generate and concentrate sustained poverty and economic inequality.

Research examining institutionalized hierarchy tends to focus on chiefdoms and states, while its emergence among small-scale societies remains poorly understood. Here, we test multiple hypotheses for institutionalized hierarchy, using environmental and social data on 89 hunter-gatherer societies along the Pacific coast of North America. We utilize statistical models capable of identifying the main correlates of sustained political and economic inequality, while controlling for historical and spatial dependence. Our results indicate that the most important predictors relate to spatiotemporal distribution of resources. Specifically, higher reliance on and ownership of clumped aquatic (primarily salmon) versus wild plant resources is associated with greater political-economic inequality, measuring the latter as a composite of internal social ranking, unequal access to food resources, and presence of slavery. Variables indexing population pressure, scalar stress, and intergroup conflict exhibit little or no correlation with variation in inequality. These results are consistent with models positing that hierarchy will emerge when individuals or coalitions (e.g., kin groups) control access to economically defensible, highly clumped resource patches, and use this control to extract benefits from subordinates, such as productive labor and political allegiance in a patron–client system. This evolutionary ecological explanation might illuminate how and why institutionalized hierarchy emerges among many small-scale societies.

From warfare to homicide, lethal violence is an all too common aspect of the human experience, yet we still do not have a clear explanation of why individuals kill one another. We suggest the search for an answer should begin with an empirical understanding of where and when individuals are more prone to experience violence. Examining patterns of lethal trauma among hunter-gatherer populations in prehistoric central California, this study reveals that violence is explained by resource scarcity and not political organization. This finding provides a clear rationale to understand why violence may be greater in specific times or places through human history, which can help predict where and when it may arise in the future.

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the pitfalls and potentials of scaling in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The volume brings together scholars from diverse fields, working on different geographical areas and time periods, to engage with scale-conscious questions regarding human sociality, culture, and evolution