The emergence of cooperation in human societies is often linked to environmental constraints, yet the specific conditions that promote cooperative behavior remain an open question. This study examines how resource unpredictability and spatial dispersion influence the evolution of cooperation using an agent-based model (ABM). Our simulations test the effects of rainfall variability and resource distribution on the survival of cooperative and non-cooperative strategies. The results show that cooperation is most likely to emerge when resources are patchy, widely spaced, and rainfall is unpredictable. In these environments, non-cooperators rapidly deplete local resources and face high mortality when forced to migrate between distant patches. In contrast, cooperators—who store and share resources—can better endure extended droughts and irregular resource availability. While rainfall stochasticity alone does not directly select for cooperation, its interaction with resource patchiness and spatial constraints creates conditions where cooperative strategies provide a survival advantage. These findings offer broader insights into how environmental uncertainty shapes social organization in resource-limited settings. By integrating ecological constraints into computational modeling, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the conditions that drive cooperation across diverse human and animal systems.

This Repast Simphony model simulates genomic admixture during the farming expansion of human groups from mainland Asia into the Papuan dominated islands of Southeast Asia during the Neolithic period.

The model simulates flood damages and its propagation through a cooperative, productive, farming system, characterized as a star-type network, where all elements in the system are connected one to each other through a central element.

The Inspection Model represents a basic food safety system where inspectors, consumers and stores interact. The purpose of the model is to provide insight into an optimal level of inspectors in a food system by comparing three search strategies.

The Inspection Model represents a basic food safety system where inspectors, consumers and stores interact. The purpose of the model is to provide insight into an optimal level of inspectors in a food system by comparing three search strategies.

The Inspection Model represents a basic food safety system where inspectors, consumers and stores interact. The purpose of the model is to provide insight into an optimal level of inspectors in a food system by comparing three search strategies.

This NetLogo model implements the Walk Away strategy in a spatial public goods game, where individuals have the ability to leave groups with insufficient levels of cooperation.

This spatially explicit agent-based model addresses how effective foraging radius (r_e) affects the effective size–and thus the equilibrium cultural diversity–of a structured population composed of central-place foraging groups.

An empirical ABM of smallholder decisions in times of drought stress.

We used our model to test how different combinations of dominance interactions present in H. saltator could result in linear, despotic, or shared hierarchies.