Marcus J. Hamilton's research while affiliated with University of Texas at San Antonio and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (90)
Isolated indigenous societies who actively avoid sustained peaceful contact with the outside world are critically endangered. Last year “Tanaru”, the lone surviving man of his tribe for at least 35 years, died in Southwest Amazonia marking the latest cultural extinction event in a long history of massacres, enslavement, and epidemics. Yet in the up...
Clovis projectile points are found in association with mammoths and other proboscideans at multiple sites from across much of North America. The conventional, and arguably parsimonious, explanation for this association is that Clovis points were weapons used to hunt the animals with which they were found. Recently, Eren et al. (2021) argued that ex...
Stone lanceolate projectile points are characterized as having a lance shape with a tip tapering to an apex and are found in the archaeological record at different times and places across the world. In North America, lanceolate points are an important component of the Paleoindian period. One of the main factors in the design of lanceolate points is...
Two key features of human sociality are anatomically complex brains with neuron-dense cerebral cortices, and the propensity to form complex social networks with non-kin. Complex brains and complex social networks facilitate flows of fitness-enhancing energy and information at multiple scales of social organization. Here, we consider how these flows...
An enduring problem in North American archaeology concerns the nature of the transition between the Clovis and Folsom Paleoindian complexes in the West. Traditional models indicate a temporal hiatus between the two complexes implying that Folsom was a population replacement for Clovis. Alternatively, if Folsom was an innovation that occurred within...
Companies are fundamental units of contemporary economies and markets and are important mechanisms through which humans interact with their environments. Understanding general properties that underlie the processes of growth in companies have long been of interest, yet fundamental debates about the effects of firm size on growth have persisted. Her...
Estimating the total human population size (i.e., abundance) of the preagricultural planet is important for setting the baseline expectations for human-environment interactions if all energy and material requirements to support growth, maintenance, and well-being were foraged from local environments. However, demographic parameters and biogeographi...
Two defining features of human sociality are large brains with neurally-dense cerebral cortices and the propensity to form complex social networks with non-kin. Large brains and the social networks in which they are embedded facilitate flows of fitness-enhancing information at multiple scales, but are also energetically expensive. In this paper, we...
Across late Pleistocene North America, Paleoindians designed a variety of projectile point styles that vary in form over time and space, but also share similar performance requirements and a common technological history. In order for projectile points to be effective components of hunting weaponry, at a minimum they must be engineered to be both ef...
Due to typesetting mistake, the correction to the formulas at the bottom of page 12 in H2 and H3 were overlooked. Also, Table 2 footnote was incorrectly presented.
Folsom is an early Paleoindian archaeological tradition found in the North American West. Here we report new AMS radiocarbon dates for the Barger Gulch and Lindenmeier sites in Colorado along with unsuccessful dating attempts for Blackwater Draw, the Mitchell Locality, Shifting Sands, and Lipscomb on the Southern Plains. We applied Bayesian modelin...
Abstract Across the planet the biogeographic distribution of human cultural diversity tends to correlate positively with biodiversity. In this paper we focus on the biogeographic distribution of mammal species and human cultural diversity. We show that not only are these forms of diversity similarly distributed in space, but they both scale superli...
Bonfire Shelter (41VV218) is a nationally significant site in the Lower Pecos region of the West Texas borderlands that contains a record of episodic use by hunter-gatherers spanning at least twelve millennia. At least two major bison hunting episodes are evident at Bonfire Shelter, one associated with Paleoindian Plainview and Folsom projectile po...
In Late Pleistocene North America colonizing hunter-gatherers knapped and used Clovis fluted projectile points. During their expansion the size and shape of Clovis points changed significantly. Archaeologists know that cultural drift contributed to this variation, but is it possible that this single source could alone generate so much variation so...
Human societies exhibit a diversity of social organizations that vary widely in size, structure, and complexity. Today, human sociopolitical complexity ranges from stateless small-scale societies of a few hundred individuals to complex states of millions, most of this diversity evolving only over the last few hundred years. Understanding how sociop...
A key feature of the distribution of life on Earth is the positive correlation between environmental productivity and biodiversity. This correlation also characterizes the distribution of human cultural diversity, which is highest near the equator and decreases exponentially toward the poles. Moreover, it is now understood that the tropics house mo...
Scaling is a general analytical framework used by many disciplines—from physics to biology and the social sciences—to characterize how population-averaged properties of a collective vary with its size. The observation of scale invariance over some range identifies general system types, be they ideal gases, ecosystems or cities. The use of scaling i...
Urban science seeks to understand the fundamental processes that drive, shape and sustain cities and urbanization. It is a multi/transdisciplinary approach involving concepts, methods and research from the social, natural, engineering and computational sciences, along with the humanities. This report is intended to convey the current “state of the...
The human species is diverse in the size, structure and complexity of our social organizations. Today, human sociopolitical complexity ranges from stateless small-scale societies to complex states that integrate millions of individuals over vast geographic areas. Here, we explore major transitions across this range of complexity. In particular, we...
Group living is common in mammals, particularly in primates and humans. Across species, groups are social networks where co-residing members exchange information and balance trade-offs between competition and cooperation for space, resources, and reproductive opportunities. From a macroecological perspective, species-specific group sizes are ultima...
The expansion of the human species out of Africa in the Pleistocene, and the subsequent development of agriculture in the Holocene, resulted in waves of linguistic diversification and replacement across the planet. Analogous to the growth of populations or the speciation of biological organisms, languages diversify over time to form phylogenies of...
North America was first settled in the late Pleistocene by Paleoindian peoples, Clovis is the best documented archeological complex associated with this settlement. Undoubtedly, Clovis groups faced adaptive challenges in the novel environments of a sparsely populated New World. In this paper, we ask whether Clovis had small-world networks to help t...
The expansion of the human species out of Africa in the Pleistocene, and the subsequent development of agriculture in the Holocene resulted in waves of linguistic diversification and replacement across the planet. Analogous to the growth of populations or the speciation of biological organisms, languages diversify over time to form phylogenies of l...
Background
The world’s last uncontacted indigenous societies in Amazonia have only intermittent and often hostile interactions with the outside world. Knowledge of their locations is essential for urgent protection efforts, but their extreme isolation, small populations, and semi-nomadic lifestyles make this a challenging task.
Methods
Remote sens...
We examine the spatial scale of prehistoric social networks represented by point types documented in western North America through comparison with ethnohistorically documented Native American interactive networks at different levels of inclusion. The ethnohistorical data come from Joseph Jorgensen’s (1980) Western Indians, which maps tribal boundar...
Background. The world’s last uncontacted indigenous societies in Amazonia have only intermittent and often hostile interactions with the outside world. Knowledge of their locations is essential for urgent protection efforts, but their extreme isolation, small populations, and semi-nomadic lifestyles make this a challenging task.
Methods. Remote sen...
Background. The world’s last uncontacted indigenous societies in Amazonia have only intermittent and often hostile interactions with the outside world. Knowledge of their locations is essential for urgent protection efforts, but their extreme isolation, small populations, and semi-nomadic lifestyles make this a challenging task.
Methods. Remote sen...
Short-term hunter-gatherer residential camps have been a central feature of human settlement patterns and social structure for most of human evolutionary history. Recent analyses of ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer data show that across different environments, the average size of hunter-gatherer bands is remarkably constant and that bands are commonly...
Background: All biological populations exhibit fluctuations in size over time due to stochastic variation in growth rates that result in local extinctions, but these dynamics are poorly understood in traditional human populations. Here, we explore extinction processes over human evolutionary history due to the effects of (i) demographic stochastici...
Residential mobility is deeply entangled with all aspects of hunter-gatherer life ways, and is therefore an issue of central importance in hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherers vary widely in annual rates of residential mobility, and understanding the sources of this variation has long been of interest to anthropologists and archaeologists. Sin...
The firm is a fundamental economic unit of contemporary human societies. Studies on the general quantitative and statistical character of firms have produced mixed results regarding their lifespans and mortality. We examine a comprehensive database of more than 25 000 publicly traded North American companies, from 1950 to 2009, to derive the statis...
It is widely reported that partisanship in the United States Congress is at an historic high. Given that individuals are persuaded to follow party lines while having the opportunity and incentives to collaborate with members of the opposite party, our goal is to measure the extent to which legislators tend to form ideological relationships with mem...
The vast forests on the border between Brazil and Peru harbour a number of indigenous groups that have limited contact with the outside world. Accurate estimates of population sizes and village areas are essential to begin assessing the immediate conservation needs of such isolated groups. In contrast to overflights and encounters on the ground, re...
Objectives:
Greater Amazonia harbors as many as 100 locations of isolated indigenous peoples. Few options are available to assess the demographic health of these populations given their limited contact with the outside world. Remote sensing offers one option.
Methods:
An isolated village in Brazil near the Peruvian border is visible with Google...
There is accumulating evidence that macroevolutionary patterns of mammal evolution during the Cenozoic follow similar trajectories on different continents. This would suggest that such patterns are strongly determined by global abiotic factors, such as climate, or by basic eco-evolutionary processes such as filling of niches by specialization. The...
There is accumulating evidence that macroevolutionary patterns of mammal evolution during the Cenozoic follow similar trajectories on different conti- nents. This would suggest that such patterns are strongly determined by global abiotic factors, such as climate, or by basic eco-evolutionary processes such as filling of niches by specialization. Th...
Lowland South America has long been a battle-ground between European colonization and indigenous survival. Initial waves of European colonization brought disease epidemics, slavery, and violence that had catastrophic impacts on indigenous cultures. In this paper we focus on the demography of 238 surviving populations in Brazil. We use longitudinal...
Body size affects nearly all aspects of organismal biology, so it is important to understand the constraints and dynamics of body size evolution. Despite empirical work on the macroevolution and macroecology of minimum and maximum size, there is little general quantitative theory on rates and limits of body size evolution. We present a general theo...
Clovis sites occur throughout the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, but are poorly documented in the central Rio Grande rift region. Here, we present data from two relatively unknown Clovis projectile point assemblages from this region: the first is from the Mockingbird
Gap Clovis site and the second is from a survey of the surrou...
Two interacting forces influence all populations: the Malthusian dynamic of exponential growth until resource limits are reached, and the Darwinian dynamic of innovation and adaptation to circumvent these limits through biological and/or cultural evolution. The specific manifestations of these forces in modern human society provide an important con...
Question: The language-farming dispersal hypothesis postulates that the current bio-geographic distribution of global ethnolinguistic diversity is due to prehistoric demic expansions of agricultural populations. Does human population size increase as diet is increasingly based on agriculture, and is this relation moderated by agricultural potential...
Supplementary data. Calculations for salmon nutrient inputs to terrestrial and riparian ecosystems.
(DOCX)
The discipline of sustainability science has emerged in response to concerns of natural and social scientists, policymakers, and lay people about whether the Earth can continue to support human population growth and economic prosperity. Yet, sustainability science has developed largely independently from and with little reference to key ecological...
IntroductionComparative Human Population EcologyComparative Human Life HistoryHuman Ecological and Evolutionary EnergeticsConclusions
The world's oceans are undergoing profound changes as a result of human activities. However, the consequences of escalating human impacts on marine mammal biodiversity remain poorly understood. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) identifies 25% of marine mammals as at risk of extinction, but the conservation status of near...
How fast can a mammal evolve from the size of a mouse to the size of an elephant? Achieving such a large transformation calls for major biological reorganization. Thus, the speed at which this occurs has important implications for extensive faunal changes, including adaptive radiations and recovery from mass extinctions. To quantify the pace of lar...
The demographic rates of most organisms are supported by the consumption of food energy, which is used to produce new biomass and fuel physiological processes. Unlike other species, modern humans use 'extra-metabolic' energy sources acquired independent of physiology, which also influence demographics. We ask whether the amount of extra-metabolic e...
Humans have a dual nature. We are subject to the same natural laws and forces as other species yet dominate global ecology and exhibit enormous variation in energy use, cultural diversity, and apparent social organization. We suggest scientists tackle these challenges with a macroecological approach-using comparative statistical techniques to ident...
a b s t r a c t Understanding the causes of variation within and between projectile point types is an important task for Paleoindian archaeologists since they rely heavily on points to investigate such things as settlement dynamics and hunting practices. One long-held explanation for the variation in early Paleoindian point form is that prey size i...
The human population and economy have grown exponentially and now have impacts on climate, ecosystem processes, and biodiversity far exceeding those of any other species. Like all organisms, humans are subject to natural laws and are limited by energy and other resources. In this article, we use a macro ecological approach to integrate perspectives...
How Mammals Grew in Size
Mammals diversified greatly after the end-Cretaceous extinction, which eliminated the dominant land animals (dinosaurs). Smith et al. (p. 1216 ) examined how the maximum size of mammals increased during their radiation in each continent. Overall, mammal size increased rapidly, then leveled off after about 25 million years....
Reconstructing the rise and fall of social complexity in human societies through time is fundamental for understanding some of the most important transformations in human history. Phylogenetic methods based on language diversity provide a means to reconstruct pre-historic events and model the transition rates of cultural change through time. We mod...
Influential demographic projections suggest that the global human population will stabilize at about 9-10 billion people by mid-century. These projections rest on two fundamental assumptions. The first is that the energy needed to fuel development and the associated decline in fertility will keep pace with energy demand far into the future. The sec...
Despite the importance of the Clovis–Folsom transition for understanding the history of western North America, its spatiotemporal dynamics remains unclear. Here we report a three-part study in which we investigated the transition using radiocarbon dates from Clovis and Folsom sites. In the first part of the study, we used dates from Folsom site-pha...
3 worksheets containing the data set for this project. The first worksheet contains all individual radiocarbon dates included in the analysis. The second worksheet contains estimated dates for individual occupations at each site. The third worksheet contains the earliest dated occupation at each site. This is our primary database.
(0.36 MB XLS)
The file contains individual worksheets of calibration and clustering output for all multicomponent sites where we did not have stratigraphic information for individual dates. The clustering on the y-axis allowed us to identify individual occupation events, which were then pooled to estimate the date of the occupation event.
(8.78 MB XLS)
Background:
Understanding the dynamics of the human range expansion across northeastern Eurasia during the late Pleistocene is central to establishing empirical temporal constraints on the colonization of the Americas. Opinions vary widely on how and when the Americas were colonized, with advocates supporting either a pre- or post- last glacial ma...
Over many millions of years of independent evolution, placental, marsupial and monotreme mammals have diverged conspicuously in physiology, life history and reproductive ecology. The differences in life histories are particularly striking. Compared with placentals, marsupials exhibit shorter pregnancy, smaller size of offspring at birth and longer...
Lifetime reproductive effort (LRE) measures the total amount of metabolized energy diverted to reproduction during the lifespan. LRE captures key components of the life history and is particularly useful for describing and comparing the life histories of different organisms. Given a simple energetic production constraint, LRE is predicted to be sim...
Background/Question/Methods
Like all biological species, humans harvest resources from the environment to meet energy requirements. The metabolic rate not only sets resource demands but is also a major determinant of ecological relations at multiple levels of biological organization. In mammals, including humans, scaling relations between populati...
The biogeographic expansion of modern humans out of Africa began approximately 50,000 years ago. This expansion resulted in the colonization of most of the land area and habitats throughout the globe and in the replacement of preexisting hominid species. However, such rapid population growth and geographic spread is somewhat unexpected for a large...