The Mother of Invention: Evolutionary Theory, Territoriality, and the Origins of Agriculture

This article argues that recent attempts to view the evolution of culture in purely selectionist terms ignore the role of stress in generating purposeful innovation and rely excessively on random processes to generate the requisite behavioral variability. Consequently, selectionist models for the origins of agriculture are inadequate. They fail to explain why people would engage in behaviors (in this case those being selected for) when such behaviors may be viewed as undesirable. This article proposes that in certain contexts population pressure will produce increasingly rigid hunter‐gatherer territorial systems, because such systems would resolve the resulting conflicts. It further proposes that, once instituted, territorial systems constrain subsequent behavioral responses to growing population pressure, and ultimately make food production inescapable in a still more limited number of contexts.