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As obligate tool users, humans habitually reconfigure resource distributions on landscapes. Such resource restructuring would have played a nontrivial role in shaping hunter-gatherer mobility decisions and emergent land-use patterns. This paper presents a model of hunter-gatherer mobility in which the habitual deposition of material resources at places on landscapes biases the future mobility decisions of energy-optimizing foragers. Thus foragers effectively construct the environments to which they adapt. With the aid of an agent-based model, this simple niche-construction model is used to deduce four predictions for emergent structure in hunter-gatherer settlement patterns. The predictions are tested against archaeological data from a hunter-gatherer settlement system in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru, 7,000–5,000 cal BP. Good agreement is found between the predicted and empirical patterns, demonstrating the model's efficacy and suggesting a behavioral explanation for structural properties of hunter-gatherer settlement systems. The niche-construction behavior and its self-organized properties may have been key components in the emergence of socioeconomic complexity in human societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evolutionary developmental theories in biology see the processes and organization of organisms as crucial for understanding the dynamic behavior of organic evolution. Darwinian forces are seen as necessary but not sufficient for explaining observed evolutionary patterns. We here propose that the same arguments apply with even greater force to culture vis-à-vis cultural evolution. In order not to argue entirely in the abstract, we demonstrate the proposed approach by combining a set of different models into a provisional synthetic theory and by applying this theory to a number of short case studies. What emerges is a set of concepts and models that allow us to consider entirely new types of explanations for the evolution of cultures. For example, we see how feedback relations--both within societies and between societies and their ecological environment--have the power to shape evolutionary history in profound ways. The ambition here is not to produce a definitive statement on what such a theory should look like but rather to propose a starting point along with an argumentation and demonstration of its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and associates, which is published within the issue. He criticizes the overstated significance given to environmental flux as a factor responsible for the extinction of the late prehistoric population in western North America. He argues that there is a lack of convincing demonstration in the paper to support the vigorous effect of climatic anomalies on human system.

The article presents the author's comments on the article "Cheating at Musical Chairs: Territoriality and Sedentism in an Evolutionary Concept," by Michael Rosenberg, which has been published within the issue. The author acknowledges the reworking of Rosenberg for population pressure. He agrees with the views of Rosenberg about the dependence of size of hunter-gather societies on the carrying capacity of their habitat.