Abstract

The earliest evidence for agriculture in Taiwan dates to about 6000 years BP and indicates that farmer-gardeners from Southeast China migrated across the Taiwan Strait. However, little is known about the adaptive interactions between Taiwanese foragers and Neolithic Chinese farmers during the transition. This paper considers theoretical expectations from human behavioral ecology based models and macroecological patterning from Binford’s hunter-gatherer database to scope the range of responses of native populations to invasive dispersal. Niche variation theory and invasion theory predict that the foraging niche breadths will narrow for native populations and morphologically similar dispersing populations. The encounter contingent prey choice model indicates that groups under resource depression from depleted high-ranked resources will increasingly take low-ranked resources upon encounter. The ideal free distribution with Allee effects categorizes settlement into highly ranked habitats selected on the basis of encounter rates with preferred prey, with niche construction potentially contributing to an upswing in some highly ranked prey species. In coastal plain habitats preferred by farming immigrants, interactions and competition either reduced encounter rates with high ranked prey or were offset by benefits to habitat from the creation of a mosaic of succession ecozones by cultivation. Aquatic-focused foragers were eventually constrained to broaden subsistence by increasing the harvest of low ranked resources, then mobility-compatible Neolithic cultigens were added as a niche-broadening tactic. In locations less suitable for farming, fishing and hunting continued as primary foraging tactics for centuries after Neolithic arrivals. The paper concludes with a set of evidence-based archaeological expectations derived from these models.

Highlights

  • The earliest evidence for agriculture in Taiwan dates to about 6000 years BP and indicates that farmer-gardeners from Southeast China migrated across the Taiwan Strait

  • In order to derive a working hypothesis about the adoption of agricultural practices by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers experiencing invasive migrations, this paper describes Taiwan’s unique geographic position and biodiversity, summarizes current environmental and archaeological knowledge about the transitional Paleolithic to Neolithic transitional period, models Late Paleolithic foraging niche breadth using Lewis Binford’s database of hunting and gathering peoples, and assesses the implications of niche variation theory, the prey choice model, and the ideal free distribution for mutually influential adaptive responses of Paleolithic Taiwanese foragers and arriving Neolithic Chinese farmer-fishers

  • Behavioral ecology concept models can be informative about theprey types with Allee effects, the paper first modeled Paleolithic foraging to create a ranking of wild dynamics at the level of the individual, and assist in the development of hypotheses about systems preferred by foragers

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Summary

Introduction

The earliest evidence for agriculture in Taiwan dates to about 6000 years BP and indicates that farmer-gardeners from Southeast China migrated across the Taiwan Strait. These vast and largely uncharted [transitional] regions are not just uninhabited territory crossed on the way to an anticipated agricultural destination by evolutionary interstates without exits They are, to the contrary, regions occupied by diverse, vibrant, and successful human societies that have developed stable, long-term economic solutions that combine low-level reliance on domesticates with continued use and management of wild species” [1]. Quaternary 2020, 3, 26 with cultural history investigations and pattern recognition in the 1980s and 90s, and moved toward the synthesis of the ways that variability in relationships can lead to greater understanding of human social change [2,3] This observed variability is germane to understanding evolutionary relationships, and framing archaeological expectations for major transitions such as the Neolithic

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