ArticlePloS one2018
Lévy foraging patterns of rural humans.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic review of foraging as lifestyle, livelihood, and landscape management strategy.Ambio · 2026Pooled it
- Investigating category transitions and interresponse times in fluency tasks.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- A single-agent extension of the SIR model describes the impact of mobility restrictions on the COVID-19 epidemic.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Spatial scales in human movement between reservoirs of infection.Journal of theoretical biology · 2021Article
- Heavy-tailed distributions in haptic perception of wielded rods.Experimental brain research · 2021Article
- Scale-free movement patterns in termites emerge from social interactions and preferential attachments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Gendered movement ecology and landscape use in Hadza hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Efficient Lévy walks in virtual human foraging.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Functional advantages of Lévy walks emerging near a critical point.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Multiscale Computation and Dynamic Attention in Biological and Artificial Intelligence.Brain sciences · 2020Review
- Lévy walk process in self-organization of pedestrian crowds.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
- Lévy-like movement patterns of metastatic cancer cells revealed in microfabricated systems and implicated in vivo.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Evidence for encounter-conditional, area-restricted search in a preliminary study of Colombian blowgun hunters.PloS one · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Movement patterns resembling Lévy walks, often attributed to the execution of an advantageous probabilistic searching strategy, are found in a wide variety of organisms, from cells to human hunter-gatherers. It has been suggested that such movement patterns may be fundamental to how humans interact and experience the world and that they may have arisen early in our genus with the evolution of a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Here we show that Lévy walks are evident in the Me'Phaa of Mexico, in Brazilian Cariri farmers and in Amazonian farmers when gathering firewood, wild fruit and nuts. Around 50% of the search patterns resemble Lévy walks and these are characterized by Lévy exponents close to 1.7. The other search patterns more closely resemble bi-phasic walks. We suggest potential generative mechanisms for the occurrence of these ubiquitous Lévy walks which can be used to guide future studies on human mobility. We show that frequent excursions and meanderings from pre-existing trails can account for our observations.
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Registered trials
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