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We report functional relationships between humans and canines based on observations in the village of Santa Cruz (Toledo District, Belize), emphasizing the cultural ecology of dogs in this lowland tropical rainforest setting and milpa agriculture subsistence system. Dogs pursue animals threatening field crops; they deter forest herbivores by leaving their scent along the myriad trails from the village to the milpa field plots; and they guard the homestead and foods stored there. Dogs also aid in daytime hunts for species that can be cornered. They are less useful in pursuits of fast species like deer and are protected from pursuing especially dangerous species like anteater or warri. Litter survival rates are low, and the lifespan of hunting dogs is significantly shorter than that of guard dogs due to hazards of forest pursuit. Explicit training for hunting is limited and maintenance costs are low as dogs are fed a partial ration of tortillas and otherwise scavenge for their diet. The village population of dogs appears not to be under genetic selection for hunting skills. Our results advance the comparative ethnographic study of this important domesticate; they should aid in the formulation and assessment of hypotheses about dog domestication and co-evolution with human society.

AIM: As a response of pastoralists to climate change, nomadic migration deeply shaped Chinese history during the imperial era. Existing research on climate‐driven nomadic migration is conducted mainly on a national–continental scale. To advance the current work, we aim to resolve migratory movements at a provincial–regional scale using a large and long‐term historical dataset as a first attempt. The spatio‐temporal features of nomadic migration under climatic effects, specifically precipitation, are analysed in the theoretical context of behavioural ecology. LOCATION: China. TIME: Imperial era (220 BC–1910 AD). STUDY SUBJECT: Nomadic pastoralist minorities in imperial China. METHODS: We frame the analysis using an ideal free distribution model. A total of 1,842 historical location records of pastoralist immigration are empirically examined. Precipitation anomalies and nomadic migration are statistically assessed with nonparametric and Poisson regression methods, and temporal interdependencies among provincial–regional migratory movements are explored with a vector autoregressive model. RESULTS: We divide imperial China into six regions according to statistical results and geographic factors. Overall, decreased precipitation and drought provoked pastoralist migrations in a north‐to‐south direction. Northern nomads, with an apparent preference for central China as a major destination, triggered the most conflicts with resident agriculturalists. Nomads originating from the Tibetan minority regions moved north‐eastward into Qinghai Province as their main destination. MAIN CONCLUSIONS: Long‐term regional patterns of pastoralist migration are closely associated with drought‐induced ecological change in imperial China. Climate‐driven dynamics assessed with long‐term historical data facilitate the understanding of climate–ecology–society interactions in behavioural ecology and macroecology. Moreover, findings from imperial China may imply that cultural acceptance and communications could avoid conflicts between immigrants and original residents when facing mass migration, an issue of growing contemporary urgency in many parts of the world.

Hunters exhibit high skill across the life span, individuals vary substantially in skill, and age-related peaks vary across sites., Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters’ increases and declines of skill from approximately 23,000 hunting records generated by more than 1800 individuals at 40 locations. The data reveal an average age of peak productivity between 30 and 35 years of age, although high skill is maintained throughout much of adulthood. In addition, there is substantial variation both among individuals and sites. Within study sites, variation among individuals depends more on heterogeneity in rates of decline than in rates of increase. This analysis sharpens questions about the coevolution of human life history and cultural adaptation.

Tl\X/ENTY An Ecological Model for the Emergence of Institutionalized Social Hierarchies qon California’s Northern Channel Islands Douglas]. Kennett, Bruce Winterhaldergjacob Bartruflf - and_/on A/I. Erlandson 0 N E O F T H E central questions in anthro- pological archaeology is how and why insti- tutionalized social hierarchies evident in ranked societies and chiefdoms developed indepen- dently i.n multiple locations around the world during the Holocene (Feinman and Manzanjlla zooo; Flannery I998)._ Status competition and social inequality exist in all human groups, re- gardless of size or mode of production (Fried I967; Boehm zooo; Diehl 2.000). However, ar- chaeological evidence for significant and institu- tionalized intragroup differences in status and wealth are confined to the last I3,ooo years, well after the first evidence for anatomically modern humans in Afiica (ca. 150,000 years ago) and their subsequent appearance throughout much of the Old and New Worlds (Klein 2.004). The preponderance of archaeological evidence sug- gests that for the majority of human history groups remained small, occupied relatively large territories at low. densities, and moved periodi- cally to adapt to spatial and temporal fluctuations ir1 resources. The record also indicates that group fissioning, environmental infilling, and emigra- tion to diverse habitats were generally favored over localized increases in group size and density or other forms of intensification. Under these conditions, institutionalized hereditary leader- ship and significant differences in status and wealth rarely emerged or persisted. Archaeological evidence for ranked societies is often found in conjunction with clear indications of localized population aggregation, economic intensification, and territorial circumscription (Blake and Clark 1999; Cameiro 1970; Clark and Blalce I994; Hayden I98I). In some instances, ranking follows heightened commitrnent to agri- culture (Price and Gebauer 1995), but similar de- velopments occurred among hunter-gatherers in areas where wild resources are concentrated, such as in marine and other aquatic habitats (Erlandson 2.001; Kennett 2oo5; Palsson I988; Yesner 1980). ‘In these contexts, certain group members were able to acquire greater wealth and status by (I) manipulating economic, social, and political relationships to their own benefit (Earle 1987); (2.) controlling the flow'of exotic goods used to signal status (Flannery I972) ,' (3) monop- olizing the labor of other group members (Earle I987; Arnold 2.ooI); and (4) creating ideologies 397

Author(s): Kennett, DJ; Anderson, A; Winterhalder, B | Editor(s): Kennett, Douglas J; Winterhalder, Bruce | Abstract: Islands in Oceania were some of the last habitable land masses on earth to be colonized by humans. Current archaeological evidence suggests that these islands were colonized episodically rather than continuously, and that bursts of migration were followed by longer periods of sedentism and population growth. The decision to colonize isolated, unoccupied islands and archipelagos was complex and dependent on a variety of social, technological and environmental variables. In this chapter we develop an integrative, multivariate approach to island colonization in Oceania based on a model from behavioral ecology known as the Ideal Free Distribution. This ecological model provides a framework that considers the dynamic character of island suitability along with density-dependent and density-independent variables influencing migratory behavior. Unique among existing models, it can account for the episodic nature of certain aspects of the colonization process. Within this context we critically evaluate the role of foraging, lowlevel food production, and ultimately intensive food production, as important contextual variables that influenced decisions to disperse. We argue that intensive food production was one variable that contributed to decreasing suitability of island habitats, stimulating dispersal, and ultimately migrations to more distant islands in Oceania. © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California.

Active search for prey is energetically costly, so understanding how foragers optimize search has been central to foraging theory. Some theoretical work has suggested that foragers of randomly distributed prey should search using Lévy flights, while work on area-restricted and intermittent search strategies has demonstrated that foragers can use the information provided by prey encounters to more effectively adapt search direction and velocity. Previous empirical comparisons of these search modes have tended to rely on distribution-level analyses, due to the difficulty of collecting event-level data on encounters linked to the GPS tracks of foragers. Here we use a preliminary event-level data-set (18.7 hours of encounter-annotated focal follows over 6 trips) to show that two Colombian blowgun hunters use adaptive encounter-conditional heuristics, not non-conditional Lévy flights, when searching for prey. Using a theoretically derived Bayesian model, we estimate changes in turning-angle and search velocity as a function of encounters with prey at lagged time-steps, and find that: 1) hunters increase average turning-angle in response to encounters, producing a more tortuous search of patches of higher prey density, but adopt more efficient uni-directional, inter-patch movement after failing to encounter prey over a sufficient period of time; and, 2) hunters reduce search velocity in response to encounters, causing them to spend more of their search time in patches with demonstrably higher prey density. These results illustrate the importance of using event-level data to contrast encounter-conditional, area-restricted search and Lévy flights in explaining the search behavior of humans and other organisms.

Author(s): Ross, Cody T; Mulder, Monique Borgerhoff; Oh, Seung-Yun; Bowles, Samuel; Beheim, Bret; Bunce, John; Caudell, Mark; Clark, Gregory; Colleran, Heidi; Cortez, Carmen; Draper, Patricia; Greaves, Russell D; Gurven, Michael; Headland, Thomas; Headland, Janet; Hill, Kim; Hewlett, Barry; Kaplan, Hillard S; Koster, Jeremy; Kramer, Karen; Marlowe, Frank; McElreath, Richard; Nolin, David; Quinlan, Marsha; Quinlan, Robert; Revilla-Minaya, Caissa; Scelza, Brooke; Schacht, Ryan; Shenk, Mary; Uehara, Ray; Voland, Eckart; Willfuhr, Kai; Winterhalder, Bruce; Ziker, John | Abstract: With apologies, an incorrect author list was given in the article. An additional author, Chris von Rueden, (Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond) also contributed to this work. Author Ryan Schacht's affiliation was out-of-date. His correct affiliation is: Department of Anthropology, East Carolina University.

We investigated the mechanism of epidemics with the impacts of climate change and socio-economic fluctuations in the Ming and Qing Dynasties in China (AD 1368–1901). Using long-term and high-quality datasets, this study is the first quantitative research that verifies the ‘climate change → economy → epidemics' mechanism in historical China by statistical methods that include correlation analysis, Granger causality analysis, ARX, and Poisson-ARX modeling. The analysis provides the evidences that climate change could only fundamentally lead to the epidemics spread and occurrence, but the depressed economic well-being is the direct trigger of epidemics spread and occurrence at the national and long term scale in historical China. Moreover, statistical modeling shows that economic well-being is more important than population pressure in the mechanism of epidemics. However, population pressure remains a key element in determining the social vulnerability of the epidemics occurrence under climate change. Notably, the findings not only support adaptation theories but also enhance our confidence to address climatic shocks if economic buffering capacity can be promoted steadily. The findings can be a basis for scientists and policymakers in addressing global and regional environmental changes.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. Changes in social organization accelerated on California's northern Channel Islands beginning around 1300 cal BP. These changes were associated with shifts in settlement and subsistence patterns related in part to drought conditions during the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA; 1150-600 cal BP). By the end of the MCA, settlement patterns demonstrate evidence for territoriality and can be described by the ideal despotic distribution. The occupants of the most productive habitats prevented new settlers from moving in and accessing the available resources. We use faunal data from five sites on western Santa Rosa Island (CA-SRI-15, -31, -97, -313, and -333) to trace changes in settlement and population aggregation through this period. Fishing, which can support higher population densities than harvesting shellfish, increased overall from the Middle (2550-800 cal BP) to Late Period (650-168 cal BP), but there were fewer settlement sites on western Santa Rosa Island. In the centuries before the Middle to Late Period Transition (MLT; 800-650 cal BP), people occupied sites geographically dispersed along the west coast of the island. After the MLT, fishing was restricted to fewer large coastal villages. We argue that environmental stress and an increase in warfare on the northern Channel Islands drove the growth of more permanent consolidated villages, the development of territoriality, and settlement patterns consistent with greater resource defense and therefore a more despotic distribution.

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. Evolutionary ecological models of human fertility predict that: (1) parents will bias investment toward the sex with the highest fitness prospects in a particular socio-ecological context; (2) fertility is subject to quantity–quality trade-offs; and (3) fertility decisions will be sensitive to both predictable and stochastic mortality risk and the relative fitness value of differently sized sib-sets (the variance compensation hypothesis). We test these predictions using demographic records from the Agta, an indigenous population from the Philippines, who, as a result of disruption by loggers, miners, and settlers, are undergoing a demographic and social/ecological transition from foragers to peasant laborers. Leveraging the spatial and temporal variation in the Agta Demographic Database, we conduct an analysis of Agta life-history traits across this transition. Specifically, we compare the Casiguran Agta (CA) with the more isolated peninsular San Ildefonso Agta (SIA) sub-population from before (phase 1) and after (phase 2) encroachment. We find: (1) evidence of a decline in overall survival from phase 1 to phase 2, coupled with increased parental investment in first-born daughters compared to first-born sons in the CA population, and increased parental investment in sons versus daughters in the SIA population; (2) evidence of a moderate quantity–quality trade-off in CA and SIA fertility in phase 1; and (3) support for predictions of the variance compensation hypothesis as a driver of the lowered relative fertility in the CA. Our customized methods, comparative framework, and simultaneous focus on fertility and mortality allow us to show how heterogeneity in mortality and fertility are linked to life history trade-offs and environmental context in a manner consistent with the predictions of evolutionary ecological models.

The prehistoric establishment and expansion of permanent settlements on the Northern Channel Islands of southern California generally follows a pattern predicted by the population ecology model, the ideal free distribution (IFD). We determine this by comparing the abundant archaeological record of these Islands against a careful quantification of habitat suitability using areal photography, satellite imagery, and field studies. We assess watershed area, length of rocky intertidal zone, length of sandy beach for plank canoe pull-outs and area of off-shore kelp beds, for 46 coastal locations. A simple descriptive analysis supports key IFD predictions. A Bayesian model fitted with the Gibbs sampler allows us to reconstruct the Native assessment of habitat that appears to underlie this process. Use of the Gibbs sampler mitigates the impact of missing data, censored variables, and uncertainty in radiocarbon dates; it allows us to predict where new settlements may yet be discovered. Theoretically, our results support a behavioral ecology interpretation of settlement history, human population expansion, and economic intensification in this region. They also demonstrate Bayesian analytical methods capable of making full use of the information available in archaeological datasets.

Aim To highlight the importance of combining the geographies of sociocultural adaptation and biodiversity risk for creating global change conservation strategies. Location Global. Methods We review global conservation adaptation strategies and the geographies that influence biological risk, as well as sociocultural capacity to set priorities for a conservation response. We then describe relationships among these geographies and discuss criteria for prioritizing areas that will have the greatest potential for effective adaptive action. Results Strategic conservation requires integrating biological geographies with physical and cultural geographies to maximize potential success with limited resources. Main conclusions Biogeography is important for strategic conservation, but it is not the only geography that matters. There is a physical geography of global change providing a complex backdrop against which biodiversity is responsive. Additionally, there is a human geography that drives the degree of threat through variations in anthropogenic disturbance of natural systems and also drives variation in potential mitigation through sociocultural capacity for conservation action. Conservation biogeography typically considers the physical geography of change and the biogeography of threat; it must expand to consider the sociocultural geography of intervention, negative and positive, if it is to be effective. Consideration of these varying geographies also drives different choices for how to implement conservation strategies.

Since despotism is a common evolutionary development in human history, we seek to understand the conditions under which it can originate, persist, and affect population trajectories. We describe a general system of population ecology equations representing the Ideal Free and Despotic Distributions for one and two habitats, one of which contains a despotic class that controls the distribution of resources. Using analytical and numerical solutions we derive the optimal concession strategy by despots with and without subordinate migration to an alternative habitat. We show that low concessions exponentially increase the time it takes for the despotic habitat to fill, and we discuss the trade-offs despots and subordinates confront at various levels of exploitation. Contrary to previous hypotheses, higher levels of despotism do not necessarily cause faster migration to alternative habitats. We further show how, during colonization, divergent population trajectories may arise if despotic systems experience Allee-type economies of scale.

The present paper examines the use of dung for two essential human resources, fuel and fertilizer, in a highland community of southern Peru. The limited energy availability and the poor soils of the region, primarily the result of high-altitude climate and topography, necessitate this practice. Alternatives to dung use are costly or unavailable. Grazing herbivores transform the widely dispersed puna grasses into a compact and easily gathered source of energy and nutrients. Native choice among available dungs corresponds to their qualities: sheep dung, richest in nutrients, is applied as fertilizer; llama and cattle dungs, each with a high caloric value, are burned as fuels. Dung use is interpreted as an energetically efficient response to the highland environment and as central to the subsistence pattern in the area. © 1974 Plenum Publishing Corporation.

This chapter analyzes the climate, landscape, flora, and fauna of the boreal forest in northern Ontario. It emphasizes facets of this ecosystem known to be of importance to humans. Its goal is to establish the context—the mix of physical and biotic factors, some patterned and some irregular in occurrence—in which human adaptation occurs. The boreal forest on first acquaintance can be deceptive. To the passing outsider it is nearly flat, without the vistas that give a landscape an immediate character. Its streams are mostly sluggish, its vegetation diminutive. It feigns monotony over space and time. Yet ecologically it is a habitat vibrant with activity. Although without strong relief, the landscape is strongly differentiated. The populations of plants and animals of the forest interact in a highly dynamic fashion. This chapter describes the forest in ways that illuminate that differentiation and activity, and attempts to capture its meaning as the context of the adaptation studies which make up the remainder of this volume (see also Kryuchkov, 1976; Pruitt, 1978; Winterhalder, 1977).

Our objectives in this final chapter are to consolidate our observations on one major piece of unfinished business—cold adaptation—and to describe the pattern of general adaptation which we have observed in our studies in boreal anthropology.

In 1974–1976, in the book Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic Life, Erasmus Darwin (1794) speculated that modification of species was brought about through the satisfaction of three wants. He identified them with admirable directness as “lust, hunger, and danger.” In the more prosaic but parallel terminology of contemporary evolutionary ecology these have become mating, foraging and the avoidance of predators (and I would add hazards). The list is still meant to be inclusive, and to represent separable arenas of adaptive or fitness-enhancing behavior, each subject to somewhat different types of investigation. Other chapters in this volume cover the mating and demographic systems and the responses to climate, physical hazards, and the dangers from predation of native peoples living in the boreal forest of northern Ontario. Adjustments by residents to the effective environment of this region are described and analyzed as adaptations. In this chapter I add an analysis relevant to E. Darwin’s second category, hunger. In language more appropriate to the time, it is a study of foraging behavior.