We investigate swarm intelligence based searching schemes for effective articulated human body tracking. The fitness function is smoothed in an annealing scheme and then quantized. This allows us to extract a pool of candidate best particles. The algorithm selects a global best from such a pool. We propose a global-local annealed particle swarm optimization to alleviate the inconsistencies between the observed human pose and the estimated configuration of the 3D model. At the beginning of each optimization cycle, estimation of the pose of the whole body takes place and then the limb poses are refined locally using smaller number of particles. The investigated searching schemes were compared by analyses carried out both through qualitative visual evaluations as well as quantitatively through the use of the motion capture data as ground truth. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the other swarm intelligence searching schemes. The images were captured using multi-camera system consisting of calibrated and synchronized cameras.