Journal ArticleDOI
Modeling Human Ecodynamics and Biocultural Interactions in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia
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TLDR
Shifts in land-use strategies changed the opportunities for social and biological interaction among Late Pleistocene hominins in western Eurasia with a cascade of consequences for cultural and biological evolution, including the disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil and archaeological records.Abstract:
Given the complex and multidimensional nature of human evolution, we need to develop theoretical and methodological frameworks to account for and model the dynamic feedbacks between co-operational biological and cultural evolutionary systems to better understand the processes that produced modern human behavior. Equally important is the generation of explicit theory-based models that can be tested against the empirical paleoanthropological record. We present a case study that examines evidence for culturally-driven behavioral change among Late Pleistocene hominins that altered the social niche occupied by hominins in western Eurasia, with consequences for subsequent biological and cultural evolution. We draw on a large sample of 167 Pleistocene assemblages across western Eurasia and employ mathematical and computational modeling to explore the feedbacks between cultural and biological inheritance. Shifts in land-use strategies changed the opportunities for social and biological interaction among Late Pleistocene hominins in western Eurasia with a cascade of consequences for cultural and biological evolution, including the disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil and archaeological records, and the acceleration of cultural evolution among ancestors of modern humans.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Environmental dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa
Richard Potts,Anna K. Behrensmeyer,J. Tyler Faith,Christian A. Tryon,Alison S. Brooks,Alison S. Brooks,John E. Yellen,John E. Yellen,Alan L. Deino,Rahab Kinyanjui,Jennifer B. Clark,Catherine M. Haradon,Naomi E. Levin,Hanneke J. M. Meijer,Hanneke J. M. Meijer,Elizabeth G. Veatch,R. Bernhart Owen,Robin W. Renaut +17 more
TL;DR: Aspects of Acheulean technology in this region imply that, as early as 615,000 years ago, greater stone material selectivity and wider resource procurement coincided with an increased pace of land-lake fluctuation, potentially anticipating the adaptability of MSA hominins.
Journal ArticleDOI
Trends in Archaeological Simulation
TL;DR: The paper concludes that the burgeoning interest in computer simulation since circa 2000 is largely characterized by mature application in areas where it fits naturally into existing inferential frameworks but that explicitly “sociological” simulation remains a challenge.
Journal ArticleDOI
The formation of lithic assemblages
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use computational modeling as an experimental environment to examine processes that form the archaeological record of lithic assemblages, and provide valuable new, quantitative insights into the information about past human social, ecological, and technological practices embedded in lithic objects.
Journal ArticleDOI
Archaeology as a social science.
TL;DR: Alternative pathways toward complexity suggest how common processes may operate under contrasting ecologies, populations, and economic integration.
References
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Book
An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms
TL;DR: An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms focuses in depth on a small set of important and interesting topics -- particularly in machine learning, scientific modeling, and artificial life -- and reviews a broad span of research, including the work of Mitchell and her colleagues.
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Culture and the evolutionary process
Robert Boyd,Peter J. Richerson +1 more
TL;DR: Using methods developed by population biologists, a theory of cultural evolution is proposed that is an original and fair-minded alternative to the sociobiology debate.
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TL;DR: C Culling is near optimal for this problem, highly noise tolerant, and the best known a~~roach in some regimes, and some new large deviation bounds on this submartingale enable us to determine the running time of the algorithm.
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A genetic algorithm tutorial
TL;DR: This tutorial covers the canonical genetic algorithm as well as more experimental forms of genetic algorithms, including parallel island models and parallel cellular genetic algorithms.