biostudies-literaturePlana FNLHPC, National Laboratory for High Performance ComputingCentro Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial, https://www.cenia.cl/Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, https://imfd.cl/en/National Agency for R+D, https://www.anid.cl/capital-humano/doctorado-nacional/National Agency for R+D, https://www.anid.cl/proyectos-de-investigacion/fondecyt-regular/e0272733https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/studies/S-EPMC10171659biostudies-literatureUnknown18(5)It has been argued that hunter-gatherers' food-sharing may have provided the basis for a whole range of social interactions, and hence its study may provide important insight into the evolutionary origin of human sociality. Motivated by this observation, we propose a simple network optimization model inspired by a food-sharing dynamic that can recover some empirical patterns found in social networks. We focus on two of the main food-sharing drivers discussed by the anthropological literature: the reduction of individual starvation risk and the care for the group welfare or egalitarian access to food shares, and show that networks optimizing both criteria may exhibit a community structure of highly-cohesive groups around special agents that we call hunters, those who inject food into the syPloS oneModularity of food-sharing networks minimises the risk for individual and group starvation in hunter-gatherer societies.PMC10171659CONICYT-PCHA/Doctorado Nacional/2016-21161085Fondecyt grant 1200967Plana FAbeliuk APerez JfalseModularity of food-sharing networks minimises the risk for individual and group starvation in hunter-gatherer societies.It has been argued that hunter-gatherers' food-sharing may have provided the basis for a whole range of social interactions, and hence its study may provide important insight into the evolutionary origin of human sociality. Motivated by this observation, we propose a simple network optimization model inspired by a food-sharing dynamic that can recover some empirical patterns found in social networks. We focus on two of the main food-sharing drivers discussed by the anthropological literature: the reduction of individual starvation risk and the care for the group welfare or egalitarian access to food shares, and show that networks optimizing both criteria may exhibit a community structure of highly-cohesive groups around special agents that we call hunters, those who inject food into the sy2023-01-01T00:00:00Z20232025-04-26T14:27:22.555Z2025-04-06T14:37:32.892ZS-EPMC101716593716350310.1371/journal.pone.0272733