Developing a Modern Toolkit to Study the Co-evolution of Human Subsistence & Social Behavior Public
Ringen, Erik (Summer 2022)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation aimed to develop a modern theoretical and computational toolkit for comparative research, with applications to three studies of the co-evolution of human subsistence and social behavior. In Chapter 2, I drew on a cross-cultural sample of 73 societies and a phylogenetic supertree of human populations to assess how cross-cultural variation in food sharing norms map onto differences in human subsistence economies and social organization. Consistent with a risk-buffering function, sharing was found to be less likely in societies with alternative means of smoothing production and consumption such as animal husbandry, food storage, and external trade. In Chapter 3, I introduced a new method for testing coevolutionary hypotheses with phylogenetic data and applied it to the question of how ‘complex’ societies evolved. I found that subsistence intensification is a leader, not a follower, in the rise of 'complex' societies worldwide. In Chapter 4, I investigated the social structure of dietary variation among Tsimane of lowland Bolivia, developing a modeling framework to estimate multilevel cultural variation from fine-grained behavioral datasets. I found that most dietary variation is structured at the household and local network level, rather than at the individual or community level. These chapters exemplify the potential for a revitalized comparative method to investigate the co-evolution of human subsistence and social behavior and offer innovations that are relevant for the study of human evolution and cross-cultural variation more broadly.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Dissertation Overview 1
Section 1: The Comparative Method in Anthropology 1
Section 2: Background & Overview of Dissertation Studies 13
References 20
Chapter 2: The evolution of daily food sharing: A Bayesian phylogenetic analysis 38
Abstract 39
Introduction 40
Materials and methods 48
Results 58
Discussion 64
References 69
Chapter 3: Novel phylogenetic methods reveal that resource-use intensification drives the evolution of “complex” societies 82
Abstract 83
Introduction 84
Part 1: Inferring complexity and its causal relationship with subsistence 89
Part 2: Dynamic coevolutionary model 95
Discussion 99
Methods 103
References 117
Chapter 4: Multilevel structure of diet among Tsimane forager-farmers 126
Introduction 127
Materials and Methods 129
Results 134
Discussion 136
References 138
Chapter 5: Conclusion 146
Introduction 146
Individual vs Group Level Data 147
The Geography of Phylogeny 148
B.B.M.B. 151
References 153
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