Further investigation of the foundation traditions of Metapontium, focusing on the persistence of much more ancient Indo-European mythic traditions and time-reckoning traditions and the presence of those elements in the bricolage that constitutes the Aeolian mythic system of Metapontium foundation narratives and their relationship to Anatolian Aeolian tradition.

Animal behavior is subject to the action of natural selection, favoring individuals that behave in ways that maximize their fitness by promoting individual survival and reproductive success. Cultural evolution plays an important role, with behavioral traits of surprising complexity spreading rapidly through a population. Behavioral ecologists measure the costs and benefits of alternative types of behavior to gain an understanding of basic behavioral processes such as territory defense, foraging, and mating. This cost–benefit approach allows quantitative predictions of behavior tightly tied to fitness, such as how long to guard a mate, or how long to forage at a particular location before moving on. Both physiological factors, such as the need to keep eggs warm, and ecological factors, such as the spatial distribution of resources, can influence the evolution of mating systems. In many species, individuals cooperate with each other in procuring food or defending against predators. Hamilton’s model of indirect selection is one possible explanation for the evolution of behavior favoring relatives, including the astounding degree of cooperation in eusocial animals. But in some species, cooperation is common even among unrelated individuals; in these cases game theory models may help explain the evolution of cooperation.

This chapter begins with a review of insight problem solving done by infrahuman animals. This work started when Wolfgang Köhler performed his informal studies of chimpanzees over 100 years ago on Tenerife. Are chimps smart because they have large brains? The size of its brain seems to be only weakly related to an animal's intelligence. What seem to be more important are the mental mechanisms that an animal uses, including, or perhaps primarily, the animal’s ability to visualize physical and geometrical transformations, such as the ability to realize that one's reflection in a mirror is a 3D image of one’s body. This ability was tested extensively with both chimpanzees and monkeys. A more elaborate experimental design was subsequently used to test the chimps’ ability to perform visual-motor coordinations with a transformed camera image. Next, the problem-solving ability of crows, parrots, and hyenas is described, and this chapter ends with the presentation of results of experiments performed by chimps and monkeys on solving the traveling salesman problem (TSP). The TSP is one of the best-studied problems both in cognitive psychology and in computer science. Human performance on the TSP is discussed in detail in the following two chapters. You will discover how sophisticated, but naïve, human subjects are when confronted with solving the TSP.