Socioeconomic complexity and the resilience of hunter-gatherer societies

Following Holling's adaptive cycle model, we propose an approach to reconstruct socio-economic developments in hunter-gatherer populations as transitions between different attractor states of complex adaptive systems, with connectedness as a key concept. This allows a reinterpretation of the classical 'simple'-'complex' hunter-gatherer dichotomy by shifting attention to the mechanisms of adaptation and dynamics holding socio-ecologic systems of hunter-gatherers in tension. Applied to the situation in Europe during the late Pleistocene, a model explaining the different long-term dynamics observable in the aftermath of the arrival of the first anatomically modern humans is discussed.