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Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Does Environmental Knowledge Inhibit Hominin Dispersal?, Colin D. Wren, Andre Costopoulos
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 …
Inference Of Cultural Transmission Modes Based On Incomplete Information, Bryan Wilder, Anne Kandler
Inference Of Cultural Transmission Modes Based On Incomplete Information, Bryan Wilder, Anne Kandler
Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints
In this paper we explore the theoretical limits of the inference of cultural transmission modes based on sparse population-level data. We approach this problem by investigating whether different transmission modes produce different temporal dynamics of cultural change. In particular we explore whether the distributions of the average time a variant stays the most common variant in the population, denoted by tmax, conditioned on the considered transmission modes are sufficiently different to allow for inference of underlying transmission modes. We assume time series data detailing the frequencies of different variants of a cultural trait in a population at different …