ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Evidence of Levy walk foraging patterns in human hunter-gatherers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 101 papers.
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101 citing papers in PubMed, 294 citations in OpenAlex.
- Investigating category transitions and interresponse times in fluency tasks.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- The hippocampus as a small-world cognitive map.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Physical crowding truncates intrinsic Lévy-like motility into caste-specific movement regimes in social termites.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Distance-amplified power-law distributions better characterize human long-distance travel.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe.Science advances · 2026Article
- Lévy statistics define anxiety and depression in mice subjected to chronic stress.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Slower searching yields higher efficiency: A case study of taxi drivers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A small set of critical hyper-motifs governs heterogeneous flow-weighted network resilience.Nature communications · 2025Article
- On the movement of the honeybee queen in the hive.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Research on re-searching: interrupted foraging is not disrupted foraging.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Physiography, foraging mobility, and the first peopling of Sahul.Nature communications · 2024Article
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- Smart active particles learn and transcend bacterial foraging strategies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Size-dependent self-avoidance enables superdiffusive migration in macroscopic unicellulars.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Energetic costs of testosterone in two subsistence populations.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2023Article
- Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Functional duality in group criticality via ambiguous interactions.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
41 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When searching for food, many organisms adopt a superdiffusive, scale-free movement pattern called a Lévy walk, which is considered optimal when foraging for heterogeneously located resources with little prior knowledge of distribution patterns [Viswanathan GM, da Luz MGE, Raposo EP, Stanley HE (2011) The Physics of Foraging: An Introduction to Random Searches and Biological Encounters]. Although memory of food locations and higher cognition may limit the benefits of random walk strategies, no studies to date have fully explored search patterns in human foraging. Here, we show that human hunter-gatherers, the Hadza of northern Tanzania, perform Lévy walks in nearly one-half of all foraging bouts. Lévy walks occur when searching for a wide variety of foods from animal prey to underground tubers, suggesting that, even in the most cognitively complex forager on Earth, such patterns are essential to understanding elementary foraging mechanisms. This movement pattern may be fundamental to how humans experience and interact with the world across a wide range of ecological contexts, and it may be adaptive to food distribution patterns on the landscape, which previous studies suggested for organisms with more limited cognition. Additionally, Lévy walks may have become common early in our genus when hunting and gathering arose as a major foraging strategy, playing an important role in the evolution of human mobility.
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