ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the opposition between the optimal forager and economic man. The rationality of the optimal forager is installed at the very heart of nature, while the specifically human domain of society and culture is seen as a source of external normative bias that may cause behaviour to deviate from the optimum. Hunters-gatherers, or foragers, live in environments characterised by diverse and heterogeneously distributed resources. The forager’s choices make up a strategy of adjustment to ecological conditions, an adaptive pattern resulting from evolutionary processes and the constraints of situation, time, and chance. The point of departure for human evolutionary ecology is that the foraging behaviour of human hunter-gatherers, just like that of their non-human counterparts, can be understood as the application, in specific environmental contexts, of decision rules or ‘cognitive algorithms’ that have been shaped up through a Darwinian process of variation under natural selection.
