Cheating at Musical Chairs

Abstract

Current explanations for the evolution of fully sedentary life‐ways suffer from serious deficiencies. Social models are contradicted by the ethnographic record and beg as many questions as they address, and adaptive models are hampered by a faulty understanding of evolutionary processes and contradicted by the fact that the ostensible “benefits” of sedentism are not true benefits at all. This article explores the concept of population pressure, often naively used in the past, and relates it to evolutionary processes. It proposes that in certain contexts increased sedentism is both innovatively generated by population pressure and independently selected for by it. It further proposes that the primary advantage to increased sedentism is ensured access to the most productive portions of a territory in the context of increasing competition. Thus increased sedentism will tend to develop whenever the energetics of the situation favor the abandonment of less productive or difficult‐to‐defend portions of an existing territory—when the risks and costs of defending the status quo come to exceed the risks and costs of exploiting a smaller territory more intensively.

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