Ethnographers have ably documented the great extent and diversity of social institutions that contemporary fishers and shellfishers employ to collectively manage common property resources. However, the collective action regimes developed among ancient maritime societies remain understudied by archaeologists. We summarize research into the development and form of collective action among the maritime societies of the western peninsular coast of Florida, USA, drawing on our own recent work in the Tampa Bay area and previous work elsewhere in the region, especially the Calusa area to the south. Archaeological evidence suggests that collective action became more important in Tampa Bay in the first centuries CE, probably owing to a marine transgression that resulted in more productive estuaries. Groups here staked claims to productive estuarine locations through the founding of villages, the building of mounds, and the construction of relatively simple marine enclosures. Historically, these changes resulted in societies of relatively small scale and limited authoritarian government. In contrast, collective action developed later in the Calusa area, may have begun in relation to resource scarcity than plenty, and may been founded in kinship rather than in public ritual. Collective action in the Calusa area resulted in projects of greater scale and complexity, providing a foundation for more hierarchical and authoritarian social formations.
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Social and general intelligence improves collective action in a common pool resource system
On a planet experiencing global environmental change, the governance of natural resources depends on sustained collective action by diverse populations. Engaging in such collective action can only build upon the foundation of human cognition in social–ecological settings. To help understand this foundation, we assess the effect of cognitive abilities on the management of a common pool resource. We present evidence that two functionally distinct cognitive abilities, general and social intelligence, improve the ability of groups to manage a common pool resource. Groups high in both forms of intelligence engage in more effective collective action that is also more consistent, despite social or ecological change. This result provides a foundation for integrating the effects of cognitive abilities with other dimensions of cognitive diversity to explain when groups will and will not sustainably govern natural resources.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10141014
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Volume:
- 117
- Issue:
- 14
- ISSN:
- 0027-8424
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 7712-7718
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Human brain size nearly quadrupled in the six million years since Homo last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees, but human brains are thought to have decreased in volume since the end of the last Ice Age. The timing and reason for this decrease is enigmatic. Here we use change-point analysis to estimate the timing of changes in the rate of hominin brain evolution. We find that hominin brains experienced positive rate changes at 2.1 and 1.5 million years ago, coincident with the early evolution of Homo and technological innovations evident in the archeological record. But we also find that human brain size reduction was surprisingly recent, occurring in the last 3,000 years. Our dating does not support hypotheses concerning brain size reduction as a by-product of body size reduction, a result of a shift to an agricultural diet, or a consequence of self-domestication. We suggest our analysis supports the hypothesis that the recent decrease in brain size may instead result from the externalization of knowledge and advantages of group-level decision-making due in part to the advent of social systems of distributed cognition and the storage and sharing of information. Humans live in social groups in which multiple brains contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence. Although difficult to study in the deep history of Homo , the impacts of group size, social organization, collective intelligence and other potential selective forces on brain evolution can be elucidated using ants as models. The remarkable ecological diversity of ants and their species richness encompasses forms convergent in aspects of human sociality, including large group size, agrarian life histories, division of labor, and collective cognition. Ants provide a wide range of social systems to generate and test hypotheses concerning brain size enlargement or reduction and aid in interpreting patterns of brain evolution identified in humans. Although humans and ants represent very different routes in social and cognitive evolution, the insights ants offer can broadly inform us of the selective forces that influence brain size.more » « less
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Abstract Wildfire risk is a defining environmental challenge throughout much of the American West, as well as in other regions where complex social and ecological dynamics defy simple policy or management solutions. In such settings, diverse forms of land use, livelihoods, and accompanying values provide the conditions for trade-offs (e.g. between protecting homes from uncontrollable fires and restoring low-severity fire to ecosystems as a natural disturbance process). Addressing wildfire risk requires grappling with these trade-offs at multiple levels—given the need for action by individuals as well as by large and diverse stakeholder groups—and under conditions of considerable complexity. We evaluated how individual and collective perception of trade-offs varies as a function of complexity through analysis of the cognitive maps—representations of perceived causal relationships among factors that structure an individual’s understanding of a system—of 111 stakeholders in the Eastern Cascades Ecoregion of central Oregon. Bayesian statistical analysis revealed a strong tendency against perception of trade-offs in individual maps, but not in a collective map that resulted from the aggregation of all individual cognitive maps. Furthermore, we found that lags (the number of factors that mediated the effect of an action on multiple valued outcomes) limited perception of trade-offs. Each additional intervening factor decreased the likelihood of a trade-off by approximately 52% in individual cognitive maps and by 10% in the collective cognitive map. However, the heterogeneity of these factors increased the likelihood of perception of trade-offs, particularly among individual cognitive maps, for which each unit increase of the Shannon diversity index translated into a 20-fold increase in the likelihood of perception of trade-offs. Taken together, these results suggest that features of complexity have distinct effects on individual—and collective-level perception of trade-offs. We discuss implications for wildfire risk decision-making in central Oregon and in other complex wildfire-prone social-ecological systems.
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