Transition to farming more likely for small, conservative groups with property rights, but increased productivity is not essential.

ABSTRACT: Theories for the origins of agriculture are still debated, with a range of different explanations offered. Computational models can be used to test these theories and explore new hypotheses; Bowles and Choi [Bowles S, Choi J-K (2013) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110(22):8830-8835] have developed one such model. Their model shows the coevolution of farming and farming-friendly property rights, and by including climate variability, replicates the timings for the emergence of these events seen in the archaeological record. Because the processes modeled occurred a long time ago, it can be difficult to justify exact parameter values; hence, we propose a fitting to idealized outcomes (FIO) method to explore the model's parameter space in more detail. We have replicated the model of Bowles and Choi, an

SUBMITTER: Gallagher EM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4655578 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature