ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2010
On the shape and fabric of human history.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
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56 citing papers in PubMed, 348 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Tracing contact and migration in pre-Bantu Southern Africa through lexical borrowing.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Exploring the complex population structure and admixture of four local Hungarian sheep breeds.Frontiers in genetics · 2025Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Evidence from personal ornaments suggest nine distinct cultural groups between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago in Europe.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization.Interface focus · 2023Article
- Cultural evolution from the producers' standpoint.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Lexical phylogenetics of the Tupí-Guaraní family: Language, archaeology, and the problem of chronology.PloS one · 2023Article
- Impact of cultural and genetic structure on food choices along the Silk Road.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Phylogenetic reconciliation.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Phylogenetic signal and rate of evolutionary change in language structures.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Extracting hierarchical features of cultural variation using network-based clustering.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this paper we outline two debates about the nature of human cultural history. The first focuses on the extent to which human history is tree-like (its shape), and the second on the unity of that history (its fabric). Proponents of cultural phylogenetics are often accused of assuming that human history has been both highly tree-like and consisting of tightly linked lineages. Critics have pointed out obvious exceptions to these assumptions. Instead of a priori dichotomous disputes about the validity of cultural phylogenetics, we suggest that the debate is better conceptualized as involving positions along continuous dimensions. The challenge for empirical research is, therefore, to determine where particular aspects of culture lie on these dimensions. We discuss the ability of current computational methods derived from evolutionary biology to address these questions. These methods are then used to compare the extent to which lexical evolution is tree-like in different parts of the world and to evaluate the coherence of cultural and linguistic lineages.
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