  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. Since mobility is, to a large extent,
driven by the need for a continuous supply of food, a natural framework for
addressing this question is provided by the metabolic theory of ecology. This
provides a powerful framework for formulating formal testable hypotheses
concerning evolutionary and ecological constraints on the scale and variation
of hunter-gatherer residential mobility. We evaluate these predictions using
extant data and show strong support for the hypotheses. We show that the
overall scale of hunter-gatherer residential mobility is predicted by average
human body size, and the limited capacity of mobile hunter-gatherers to store
energy internally. We then show that the majority of variation in residential
mobility observed across cultures is predicted by energy availability in local
ecosystems. Our results demonstrate that large-scale evolutionary and
ecological processes, common to all plants and animals, constrain
hunter-gatherers in predictable ways as they move through territories to
effectively exploit resources over the course of a year. Moreover, our results
extend the scope of the metabolic theory of ecology by showing how it
successfully predicts variation in the behavioral ecology of populations within
a species.
