Sources and Storages as Limiting Factors. Stone for tools, soil nutrients, and fresh water from rain can be limiting factors on Family Group densities, meaning they can restrict the size of Family Groups and the permanence of their residence. Family foraging and horticultural groups are known to pulse a location, consuming storages of natural resources in a year or more, before moving on to another location, allowing the first to recycle and recover its productivity. As all top consumers, Family Groups have significant feedback effects within their ecosystem, but relatively speaking there is much less modification of the natural environment than is found in Local Groups, and certainly in Chiefdoms and States. A division of labor by sex and age is common, and occasionally temporary leaders are chosen to lead work tasks.
All humans use language to produce models that explain the world.
These models are constantly being negotiated, retold, relearned, and enculturated into young members. Cultural models recount the ecstatic and the mundane, the sacred and the profane. Probably the most resilient cultural models are those that encode practical knowledge for subsistence gathering, i.e., models for tool production, for foraging strategies, and for the division of labor. Cultural models provide a coherent explanation for the existent form of social hierarchy and division of labor. All members of human societies contribute to the negotiated production and maintenance of cultural models, which explain and interpret their worlds.