Anthropology Commons^™

Does Environmental Knowledge Inhibit Hominin Dispersal?, Colin D. Wren, Andre Costopoulos

Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

We investigate the relationship between the dispersal potential of a hominin population, its local scale foraging strategies, and the characteristics of the resource environment using an agent-based modeling approach. Wren et al. (2014) demonstrated that natural selection can favour a relatively low capacity for assessing and predicting the quality of the resource environment, especially when the distribution of resources is highly clustered. This also suggested that the more knowledge foraging populations had about their environment, the less likely they were to abandon the landscape they know and disperse into novel territory. The present study gives agents new individual and social …