LAUSR

Long‐distance social relationships have been a feature of human evolutionary history; evidence from the paleoanthropological, archeological, and ethnographic records suggest that one function of these relationships is to manage the risk of resource shortfalls due to climate variability. We should expect long‐distance relationships to be especially important when shortfalls are chronic or temporally positively autocorrelated, as these are more likely to exhaust local adaptations for managing risk. Further, individuals who experience shortfalls not as rare shocks, but as patterned events, should be more likely to pay the costs of maintaining long‐distance relationships. We test these hypotheses in the context of two communities of Bolivian horticulturalists, where climate variability—especially precipitation variability—is relevant to production and access to long‐distance connections is improving.