ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
What drives the evolution of hunter-gatherer subsistence technology? A reanalysis of the risk hypothesis with data from the Pacific Northwest.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Climate seasonality and predictability during the middle stone age and implications for technological diversification in early Homo sapiens.Scientific reports · 2025Article
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- Modelling and measuring complexity of traditional and ancient technologies using Petri nets.PloS one · 2022Article
- Homo sapiens lithic technology and microlithization in the South Asian rainforest at Kitulgala Beli-lena (c. 45 - 8,000 years ago).PloS one · 2022Article
- Cultural evolution and prehistoric demography.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- A multilevel analytical framework for studying cultural evolution in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2020Review
- Middle Paleolithic complex technology and a Neandertal tar-backed tool from the Dutch North Sea.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- On the absence of a correlation between population size and 'toolkit size' in ethnographic hunter-gatherers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Cultural complexity and evolution in fluctuating environments.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Divide and conquer: intermediate levels of population fragmentation maximize cultural accumulation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Integrative studies of cultural evolution: crossing disciplinary boundaries to produce new insights.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Still Bay and Howiesons Poort sites (South Africa) are consistent with the risk hypothesis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- The niche construction of cultural complexity: interactions between innovations, population size and the environment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Identifying early modern human ecological niche expansions and associated cultural dynamics in the South African Middle Stone Age.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- The transition to foraging for dense and predictable resources and its impact on the evolution of modern humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Population size does not explain past changes in cultural complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Sociality influences cultural complexity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2014Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Recent studies have suggested that the decisions that hunter-gatherers make about the diversity and complexity of their subsistence toolkits are strongly affected by risk of resource failure. However, the risk proxies and samples employed in these studies are potentially problematic. With this in mind, we retested the risk hypothesis with data from hunter-gatherer populations who lived in the northwest coast and plateau regions of the Pacific Northwest during the early contact period. We focused on these populations partly because the northwest coast and plateau differ in ways that can be expected to lead to differences in risk, and partly because of the availability of data for a wide range of risk-relevant variables. Our analyses suggest that the plateau was a more risky environment than the northwest coast. However, the predicted differences in the number and complexity of the populations' subsistence tools were not observed. The discrepancy between our results and those of previous tests of the risk hypothesis is not due to methodological differences. Rather, it seems to reflect an important but hitherto unappreciated feature of the relationship between risk and toolkit structure, namely that the impact of risk is dependent on the scale of the risk differences among populations.
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