ArticleRoyal Society open science2021
Hunter-gatherer foraging networks promote information transmission.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Far-reaching hunter-gatherer networks during the Last Glacial Maximum in Western Europe.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Modelling Mobility of Hunter-Gatherer Populations: A Dynamic Simulation Approach Based on Cellular Automata.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2025Article
- Architectural styles of curiosity in global Wikipedia mobile app readership.Science advances · 2024Article
- Beyond the here and now: hunter-gatherer socio-spatial complexity and the evolution of language.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- How market integration impacts human disease ecology.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Human group size puzzle: why it is odd that we live in large societies.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Individual exploration and selective social learning: balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Hunter-gatherer foraging networks promote information transmission.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Central-place foraging (CPF), where foragers return to a central location (or home), is a key feature of hunter-gatherer social organization. CPF could have significantly changed hunter-gatherers' spatial use and mobility, altered social networks and increased opportunities for information-exchange. We evaluated whether CPF patterns facilitate information-transmission and considered the potential roles of environmental conditions, mobility strategies and population sizes. We built an agent-based model of CPF where agents moved according to a simple optimal foraging rule, and could encounter other agents as they moved across the environment. They either foraged close to their home within a given radius or moved the location of their home to new areas. We analysed the interaction networks arising under different conditions and found that, at intermediate levels of environmental heterogeneity and mobility, CPF increased global and local network efficiencies as well as the rate of contagion-based information-transmission. We also found that central-place mobility strategies can further improve information transmission in larger populations. Our findings suggest that the combination of foraging and movement strategies, as well as the environmental conditions that characterized early human societies, may have been a crucial precursor in our species' unique capacity to innovate, accumulate and rely on complex culture.
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