It is difficult to overstate the cultural and biological impacts that the domestication of plants
and animals has had on our species. Fundamental questions regarding where, when, and …

The New World tropical forest is now considered to be an early and independent cradle of
agriculture. As in other areas of the world, our understanding of this issue has been …

More than 40years ago Kent Flannery coined the term Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) in
reference to a broadening of the subsistence base of Late Pleistocene hunter–gatherers in …

The future of archaeological science relies as much (if not more) on theoretical as on
methodological developments. As with anything in biology, explaining past human behavior …

Abstract Niche Construction Theory (NCT) provides a powerful conceptual framework for
understanding how and why humans and target species entered into domesticatory …

This introduction to the symposium and to this issue of Current Anthropology attempts to
provide some sense of the topic, the meeting itself, the participants, and some of the initial …

One of the challenges in evaluating arguments for extending the conceptual framework of
evolutionary biology involves the identification of a tractable model system that allows for an …

The initial domestication of plants and animals and the subsequent emergence of
agricultural economies in different world regions represent a major evolutionary transition in …

A multidimensional conceptual framework is advanced that characterizes early agriculture
as a subset of human-environment interactions. Three cross-articulating dimensions of …

Placed within a relatively informal and free-flowing context of “conversation,” this issue of
Current Anthropology offers an opportunity to step outside of the strictures of formal scholarly …