ABSTRACT
Adaptation is the process of evolutionary change by which the organism provides a better “solution” to the “problem”, and the end result is the state of being adapted. In Reynolds’ model, a hypothetical microband of 5 foragers, starting from a position of ignorance, “learns” how to schedule its collection of the 11 major plant foods of the Guilá Naquitz environment by trial and error over a very long period of time. Agricultural plants (cucurbits, beans, and primitive maize) are introduced into the simulation at this point, and the whole process begins again. Slowly but surely, the microband shuffles its priorities until it develops a new coadapted set of strategies that are hard to improve upon. More common in archaeology are cases where some of the values are empirically based but others amount to “missing data” and have to be made up by the investigator.
