ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the problem of origination in food sharing from a multilevel selection perspective. It reviews the models of mechanism that have been proposed to explain the evolution of altruism, including kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and multilevel selection. The chapter discusses data collected from a spatially explicit evolutionary agent-based model designed to investigate the effect of geographically fragmented woodlands resources on the evolution of altruistic food sharing during the Pliocene and Pleistocene in East Africa. William Hamilton was among the first to develop an analytical model of the evolution of altruism that did not include intergroup selection. The chapter investigates whether ecological patchiness affects the evolution of food sharing in the presence of selection when s is modelled as a continuous trait. Paleolithic archaeologists have routinely drawn on the models of circumstance influenced by individual-level selection, such as tolerated theft, risk reduction reciprocity, showing-off, when inferring hominin behaviour from the archaeological record of the Early Stone Age.
