risk of resource failure and toolkit variation in small-scale farmers and herders风险的资源衰竭和工具包小规模农民和牧民的变化.pdfVIP

Risk of Resource Failure and Toolkit Variation in Small- Scale Farmers and Herders 1 1 1,2 2 Mark Collard *, April Ruttle , Briggs Buchanan , Michael J. O’Brien 1 Human Evolutionary Studies Program and Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, 2 Department of Anthropology, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, United States of America Abstract Recent work suggests that global variation in toolkit structure among hunter-gatherers is driven by risk of resource failure such that as risk of resource failure increases, toolkits become more diverse and complex. Here we report a study in which we investigated whether the toolkits of small-scale farmers and herders are influenced by risk of resource failure in the same way. In the study, we applied simple linear and multiple regression analysis to data from 45 small-scale food-producing groups to test the risk hypothesis. Our results were not consistent with the hypothesis; none of the risk variables we examined had a significant impact on toolkit diversity or on toolkit complexity. It appears, therefore, that the drivers of toolkit structure differ between hunter-gatherers and small-scale food-producers. Citation: Collard M, Ruttle A, Buchanan B, O’Brien MJ (2012) Risk of Resource Failure and Toolkit Variation in Small-Scale Farmers and Herders. PLoS ONE 7(7): e40975. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040975 Editor: John P. Hart, New York State Museum, United States of America Received April 30, 2012; Accepted June 19, 2012; Published July 26, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Collard et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution