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Evidence of Levy walk foraging patterns in human hunter-gatherers.

Publication ,  Journal Article
Raichlen, DA; Wood, BM; Gordon, AD; Mabulla, AZP; Marlowe, FW; Pontzer, H
Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
January 2014

When searching for food, many organisms adopt a superdiffusive, scale-free movement pattern called a Lévy walk, which is considered optimal when foraging for heterogeneously located resources with little prior knowledge of distribution patterns [Viswanathan GM, da Luz MGE, Raposo EP, Stanley HE (2011) The Physics of Foraging: An Introduction to Random Searches and Biological Encounters]. Although memory of food locations and higher cognition may limit the benefits of random walk strategies, no studies to date have fully explored search patterns in human foraging. Here, we show that human hunter-gatherers, the Hadza of northern Tanzania, perform Lévy walks in nearly one-half of all foraging bouts. Lévy walks occur when searching for a wide variety of foods from animal prey to underground tubers, suggesting that, even in the most cognitively complex forager on Earth, such patterns are essential to understanding elementary foraging mechanisms. This movement pattern may be fundamental to how humans experience and interact with the world across a wide range of ecological contexts, and it may be adaptive to food distribution patterns on the landscape, which previous studies suggested for organisms with more limited cognition. Additionally, Lévy walks may have become common early in our genus when hunting and gathering arose as a major foraging strategy, playing an important role in the evolution of human mobility.

Duke Scholars

Published In

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

DOI

EISSN

1091-6490

ISSN

0027-8424

Publication Date

January 2014

Volume

111

Issue

2

Start / End Page

728 / 733

Related Subject Headings

  • Tanzania
  • Statistics, Nonparametric
  • Models, Statistical
  • Locomotion
  • Likelihood Functions
  • Humans
  • History, Ancient
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Ethnicity
  • Appetitive Behavior
 

Citation

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Raichlen, D. A., Wood, B. M., Gordon, A. D., Mabulla, A. Z. P., Marlowe, F. W., & Pontzer, H. (2014). Evidence of Levy walk foraging patterns in human hunter-gatherers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(2), 728–733. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1318616111
Journal cover image

Published In

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

DOI

EISSN

1091-6490

ISSN

0027-8424

Publication Date

January 2014

Volume

111

Issue

2

Start / End Page

728 / 733

Related Subject Headings

  • Tanzania
  • Statistics, Nonparametric
  • Models, Statistical
  • Locomotion
  • Likelihood Functions
  • Humans
  • History, Ancient
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Ethnicity
  • Appetitive Behavior