ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
Identifying key socioecological factors influencing the expression of egalitarianism and inequality among foragers.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modeling the rise and demise of Classic Maya cities: Climate, conflict, and economies of scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Identifying key socioecological factors influencing the expression of egalitarianism and inequality among foragers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Toward an evolutionary ecology of (in)equality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding how resource characteristics influence variability in social and material inequality among foraging populations is a prominent area of research. However, obtaining cross-comparative data from which to evaluate theoretically informed resource characteristic factors has proved difficult, particularly for investigating interactions of characteristics. Therefore, we develop an agent-based model to evaluate how five key characteristics of primary resources (predictability, heterogeneity, abundance, economy of scale and monopolizability) structure pay-offs and explore how they interact to favour both egalitarianism and inequality. Using iterated simulations from 243 unique combinations of resource characteristics analysed with an ensemble machine-learning approach, we find the predictability and heterogeneity of key resources have the greatest influence on selection for egalitarian and nonegalitarian outcomes. These results help explain the prevalence of egalitarianism among foraging populations, as many groups probably relied on resources that were both relatively less predictable and more homogeneously distributed. The results also help explain rare forager inequality, as comparison with ethnographic and archaeological examples suggests the instances of inequality track strongly with reliance on resources that were predictable and heterogeneously distributed. Future work quantifying comparable measures of these two variables, in particular, may be able to identify additional instances of forager inequality. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary ecology of inequality'.
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