A niche of their own: population dynamics, niche diversification, and biopolitics in the recent biocultural evolution of hunter-gatherers

Abstract

Three decades have passed since Keeley published his comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural variation in hunter-gatherer social complexity, sedentism, and storage across diverse environmental and demographic conditions (Keeley, L.H., 1988. Hunter-gatherer economic complexity and “population pressure”: A cross-cultural analysis. J. Anthropol. Archaeol. 7, 373–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-4165(88)90003-7). This article reconsiders Keeley’s work, shifting theoretical focus to niche construction, biocultural adaptation, and the biopolitics of inclusion and exclusion. In recent millennia, human niche construction has become defined by intense matter and energy extraction at or across key hydrospheric, atmospheric, and lithospheric regime boundaries. Associated global population growth has depended on the biocultural evolution of positive elasticity in energy extraction rates, with respect to labor inputs. This article presents a statistical reanalysis of Keeley’s cross-cultural data, documenting the niche-divergence between immediate-returns hunter-gatherers and delayed-returns, storage-dependent foragers. It is argued that the intricate relationships among niche elasticity, population-growth elasticity, niche diversification, and the biopolitics of inclusion and exclusion have dynamically shaped ecological enrichment—in the form of patch engineering—and demographic disruption—mainly in the form of dispersal, migration, raiding, and warfare. This article aims to offer new perspectives on the systemic coupling among political complexity, economic development, inequality, and environmental impacts in post-Pleistocene human systems.