Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively?: Ethnohistoric Data Reveal the Contexts, Advantages, and Evolutionary Importance of Communal Hunting

• Autores: Eugène Morin, Douglas Bird, Bruce Winterhalder, Rebecca Bliege Bird
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Vol. 65, Nº. 5, 2024, págs. 876-921
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • We analyze a new ethnographic and ethnohistoric database of quantitative cases (n = 139) and qualitative information on a neglected form of forager subsistence—communal drive hunts (CDHs)—using a human behavioral ecology perspective. Among our key findings are that (i) in specific contexts, CDHs achieve higher return rates or lower odds of failure than encounter hunting; (ii) CDHs increase the rate of success for hunting large ungulates that cluster and have long flight initiation distances and high predator escape velocities; (iii) CDHs engage the benefits and problems of collaborative, sometimes community-wide behavior at scales from the small and opportunistic to the large and institutionalized; (iv) although formerly commonplace, CDHs largely disappeared by the late nineteenth century because of colonial impacts on Indigenous societies and the adoption of repeating rifles and dogs, favoring encounter hunting; (v) cooperative hunting by great apes and indirect archaeological evidence suggest that collaborative hunting is potentially a practice of considerable antiquity and is thus important in the evolution of hominin prosocial behavior; and (vi) while human behavioral ecology has robust models for the analysis of the social distribution of subsistence resources, the development of complementary models for social production is just beginning.