that leads to nearly optimal solutions to ecological problem-solving (see
Laland and Brown, 2012 for a review). These researchers do not study
human adaptations per se. An adaptation is a behavioral, physiological,
or anatomical feature or trait produced by natural selection to serve a
particular purpose or function at the time of its development. Adaptations
increase fitness,whichmeans they afford reproductive advantages
in individuals expressing the trait. The adaptiveness program within
HBE takes as a given that the primary ancient adaptation guiding
human behavior is flexibility or broad adaptiveness. These models
then assume that the human adaptive machine is run by a costbenefit
systemthat leads to nearly optimal solutions to functional problems
(Laland and Brown, 2012). Models, therefore, are primarily confined
to deciphering or describing which type of cost-benefit
phenotypic behavior (e.g., maximizing caloric intake relative towork effort)
stands behind the facts observable in the archeological record.
Note that this goal stands in contrast to Kelly's (2013) description
abovewhich suggested that optimizationmodels do not provide a priori
explanations and answers. In essence these models do just that. The
higher order “answer” is already known in these models, namely the
facts observable in the archeological recordwere fixed by Darwinian selection
in our ancient ancestors because they led to greater reproductive
success in those individuals who expressed broad-scale adaptiveness.
The goal of archeology, then, is not to explain higher order behavior,
but merely to describe the cost-benefit trait or currency that led to the
archeological patterns we observe. This is important because according
to adaptiveness models within HBE, human behavior has already been
selected to optimize reproductive success through behavioral flexibility,
so the cognitive viewpoints of individual human actors, or historically
contingent behaviors, are largely unimportant to a scientific study of
human behavior unless they specifically are a part of the cost-benefit
optimization trait being tracked.