Throughout the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, humans adapted to significant climate and environmental change. One key region for investigating these adaptive strategies is Island Southeast Asia, where fluctuating sea levels led to dramatic changes in coastlines, vegetation and fauna. The authors present new data from the re-excavation of Pilanduk Cave on Palawan Island, Philippines. The results corroborate the results of earlier excavations that identified Pleistocene occupation of the site. Pilanduk shows evidence for specialised deer hunting and freshwater mollusc consumption during the Last Glacial Maximum. The results add to the evidence for the shifting foraging behaviours of modern humans occupying variable tropical environments across Island Southeast Asia.

Diverse theoretical perspectives suggest that place plays an important role in human behavior. One recent perspective proposes that habitual and recursive use of places among humans may be an emergent property of obligate tool use by our species. In this view, the costs of tool use are reduced by preferential occupation of previously occupied places where cultural materials have been discarded. Here we use the model to generate five predictions for ethnographic mobility patterns. We then test the predictions against observations made during one month of coresidence with a residentially mobile Dukha family in the Mongolian Taiga. We show that (1) there is a strong tendency to occupy previously used camps, (2) previously deposited materials are habitually recycled, (3) reoccupation of places transcends kinship, (4) occupational hiatuses can span decades or longer, and (5) the distribution of occupation intensity among camps is highly skewed such that most camps are not intensively reoccupied whereas a few camps experience extremely high reoccupation intensity. These findings complement previous archaeological findings and support the conclusion that the constructed dimensions of human habitats exert a strong influence on mobility patterns in mobile societies.

The transfer of food among group members is a ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among unrelated individuals, has led researchers to evaluate numerous hypotheses about the adaptive functions and patterns of sharing in different ecologies. This article attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models: kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the extent to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. Each model can explain some of the variance in sharing patterns within groups, and so generalizations that ignore or deny the importance of any one model may be misleading. Careful multivariate analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of food transfer patterns are therefore necessary tools for assessing aspects of the sexual division of labor, human life history evolution, and the evolution of the family. This article also introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies. I discuss the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities as a key feature that influences sharing behavior.

Major workers are the dominant caste in foraging parties of Macrotermes michaelseni; they also have the largest sternal gland, with the highest potential trail-laying activity. The termite utilizes pheromonal trails along open-air foraging routes, surface galleries and in the subterranean gallery network. Thus, surface galleries appear to serve primarily as protective structures to foraging traffic, while trails lead foragers to food sites. Well-established trails on paper lost activity within 2–3 hr under open-air field conditions. In a choice situation, a trail leading to food source was 30–40 times stronger than that directed to an empty food chamber, suggesting that food influences trail-laying and recruitment behaviour of the termite.