期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2020
卷号：117
期号：17
页码：9151-9153
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2004254117
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The abilities of humans to produce and store food have been key components in theories that explain how and why societies flourished and developed complex socioeconomic systems over time. Archaeological evidence shows that the transition from hunting/gathering/foraging to the purposeful cultivation of plants and domestication of animals was an important turning point for humans on a global scale. These processes led to significant changes in how societies organized labor, managed resources, and affected environments. There has been increased recognition, however, that large population densities and the rise of social complexity would not have necessarily required agriculture, as Thompson et al. (1) demonstrate in their PNAS paper on the Calusa polity in southwest Florida. In some coastal areas here and elsewhere, peoples focused instead on mass harvesting and live storage of marine species to build surpluses and fuel economic specialization. In the not-so-distant past, scholars argued that coastal regions were unattractive places for humans to live compared to interior regions with abundant floral and faunal resources (2). These were big game-centric models that privileged men as hunters, with the seacoast envisaged as being resource poor, patchy, and generally insufficient for larger human populations to live. Decades of archaeological research have now changed this perspective, with many acknowledging that marine foods were often more nutritious, plentiful, and easier to procure than once believed (3⇓⇓–6). As part of living in these environments, peoples who settled islands and coastal regions around the world developed sophisticated technologies for fishing, hunting animals (e.g., whales, pinnipeds, birds), and storing foodstuffs. They were so successful, in fact, that populations grew considerably and expanded into some of the most remote places on Earth such as Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. Many of these and other maritime-oriented cultures developed in very complex ways (7 … [↵][1]1Email: smfitzpa{at}uoregon.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1
