Environmental instability and habitat choice in a simple agent-based foraging model: Agents prefer diversity in rates of environmental change

Note: This is a follow up to my SAA2018 paper Some very interesting recent work has focused on the role of environmental instability in human evolution (Potts 2013, Grove 2014) and the development of cultural complexity (Fogarty et al 2017). This work has tended to look at adapative responses of populations of learning agents in…

Intermediaries have a place in science communication

A minor debate erupted this week about the extent to which researchers should rely on intermediaries to communicate science to the general public. Yes, researchers know their stuff best, and yes, professional science communicators, such as science journalists, have external motivations (i.e. making a living), so they are not pure in the eyes of science.…

Pseudoarchaeology as opportunity

There has recently been renewed attention among archaeologists to the damage that pseudoarchaeology can do, and how we can address it. What used to be confined to an obscure section of the used book store is now the central theme of some of the most watched programs on television (Curse of Oak Island and Ancient…

Preview of my SAA2018 paper : Environmental instability, habitat choice, and mobility : An agent-based simulation

The Problem The work my team and I did in James Bay, Northern Quebec, shows that archaeological sites in the region tend to be located in places that are relatively environmentally stable, but are surrounded by areas with relatively high degree of variability in rates of environmental change. The region is characterized by rapid land…