Why Do Humans Hunt Cooperatively?
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.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.
doi: 10.1086/732354
