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Ecological Constraints And Life History Tradeoffs Among Human Foragers And Their Prey, Oskar Burger

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation attempts to identify ecological relationships useful for understanding large-scale patterns in human-environment interaction that can be applied to archaeological studies. It uses three established bodies of theory to understand ecological constraints and life history tradeoffs, applying the same basic framework to human adaptations and the demographic trends of other mammals. First, a model from optimal foraging theory (the marginal value theorem), which posits a tradeoff between resource availability and resource processing, is applied to zooarchaeology to understand human butchery patterns. Humans tend to butcher prey according to the predictions of the model in both ethnographic and archaeological settings: …