Our new paper on the origins of human agriculture is out today in Nature Human Behavior. By modeling how the potential density of hunter-gatherer societies changed both around the world and in regions where agriculture originated, our study evaluated the support for alternative hypotheses related to why agriculture evolved when it did. Our analyses indicate that the carrying capacity of hunter-gatherer habitats in these areas of origin was generally improving during the times in which agriculture evolved, supporting the idea that surplus may have enabled early humans to develop this costly new mode of subsistence (possibly by allowing them to allocate time and energy into the domestication of plants and animals and the development of new techniques to derive sustenance from their environment).
Stay tuned for the next few months for more exciting products of our collaboration with linguists, social scientists, and other eco-evolutionary biologists on this topic. Comments are closed.
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February 2022
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