The subsistence technology of forager communities has varied greatly over space and time. This paper (i) reviews briefly the main causal factors the literature identifies as responsible for this variation; (ii) analyzes in some detail the most prominent idea in the literature on spatial variation:Complex technology is an adaptive response to elevated risks of subsistence failure; (iii) it argues that the alleged empirical support for this hypothesis depends on dubious proxies of risk; (iv) it argues that it fails to explain the subsistence technologies of desert foragers, who generally live with simple technologies in high-risk environments; (v) it offers an alternative analysis, based on the reduced opportunity costs of complex technologies in highly seasonal environments, on the high value of typical forager targets in those environments and their relatively predictable location in space and time; and (v) the paper concludes with a conjecture about the role of environmental variation in toolkit change over deep time.

中文翻译：

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觅食者及其工具：风险、技术和复杂性

觅食群落的生存技术在空间和时间上发生了很大变化。本文 (i) 简要回顾了文献确定的导致这种变化的主要因果因素；(ii) 更详细地分析文献中关于空间变化的最突出的观点：复杂技术是对生存失败风险升高的适应性反应；(iii) 它辩称，对这一假设的所谓经验支持取决于可疑的风险代理；(iv) 它辩称，它未能解释沙漠觅食者的生存技术，他们通常在高风险环境中使用简单的技术；(v) 它提供了一种替代分析，基于复杂技术在高度季节性环境中降低的机会成本，关于这些环境中典型觅食目标的高价值及其在空间和时间上相对可预测的位置；(v) 本文最后提出了一个关于环境变化在工具箱变化中的作用的猜想。