Hunter-gatherer foraging networks promote information transmission

Central-place foraging, where foragers return to a central location (or home-base), is a key feature of hunter-gatherer social organization. Although why or when our ancestors started returning to "home-bases" remains unclear, it likely had significant implications for many aspects of hominin evolution. For example, central-place foraging, by changing hunter-gatherers9 use of space and mobility, could have altered social networks and increased opportunities for information exchange. We evaluated whether central-place foraging patterns facilitate information transmission and considered the potential roles of environmental conditions and mobility strategies. We built an agent-based central-place foraging model where agents move according to a simple optimal foraging rule, and can encounter other agents as they move across the environment. They either forage close to their home-bases within a given radius or move their home-bases to new areas. We analyzed the interaction networks arising across different environments and mobility strategies. We found that, at intermediate levels of environmental heterogeneity and mobility, central-place foraging increased global and local network efficiencies as well as the rate of contagion-based information transmission (simple and complex). Our findings suggest that the combination of foraging and movement strategies, as well as the underlying environmental conditions that characterized early human societies, may have been a crucial precursor in our species9 unique capacity to innovate, accumulate and rely on complex culture.