Why hunter and gatherers did not die more often? Simulating prehistoric decision making.

DEL CASTILLO, FLORENCIA; BARCELÓ, JOAN ANTON

Archaeology in the Digital Era. Papers from the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA)

Amsterdam University Press

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2013; p. 154 - 163

We have created a computer model of economic and social cooperation among hunter-gatherers that simulates how prehistoric people survived. This is an agent-based model in which agents simulating hunter-gatherer households move through a territory for resources irregularly distributed. The probabilities of their survival not only depend on the availability of resources but on the probability to establish cooperation links with other agents in such a way that the quantity of labor is enhanced and the probability of success in hunting increases. We expect to be able to discern if survival is conditioned by social decisions only, or if it is the result of the constraints on mobility generated by geography and the irregular distribution of resources, both in space and time. Results suggest that small sized groups (less than 10 families) died by starving when agents could not build a high enough number of social ties with other groups. Cooperation appears to be filtered by the specific social (cultural) identity of agents, a parameter that changes constantly, because it is being negotiated at run time as a consequence of previous stances of successive cooperation.