ArticlePloS one2012
Cultural phylogenetics of the Tupi language family in lowland South America.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 95 citations in OpenAlex.
- A multidisciplinary overview on the Tupi-speaking people expansion.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Review
- Hunter-gatherer genetics research: Importance and avenues.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Predicting the geographic distribution of ancient Amazonian archaeological sites with machine learning.PeerJ · 2023Article
- Lexical phylogenetics of the Tupí-Guaraní family: Language, archaeology, and the problem of chronology.PloS one · 2023Article
- Maize dispersal patterns associated with different types of endosperm and migration of indigenous groups in lowland South America.Annals of botany · 2022Article
- Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter-gatherer societies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- A genomic perspective on South American human history.Genetics and molecular biology · 2022Article
- Reassessing the role of climate change in the Tupi expansion (South America, 5000-500 BP).Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- TuLeD (Tupían lexical database): introducing a database of a South American language family.Language resources and evaluation · 2021Article
- Diversity begets diversity in mammal species and human cultures.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Genomic insight into the origins and dispersal of the Brazilian coastal natives.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Archaeological expansions in tropical South America during the late Holocene: Assessing the role of demic diffusion.PloS one · 2020Article
- Identifying post-marital residence patterns in prehistory: A phylogenetic comparative analysis of dwelling size.PloS one · 2020Article
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- Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
- The Origins and Maintenance of Female Genital Modification across Africa : Bayesian Phylogenetic Modeling of Cultural Evolution under the Influence of Selection.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
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- The domestication of Amazonia before European conquest.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Review
- Algorithms for computing the triplet and quartet distances for binary and general trees.Biology · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundRecent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic phylogenies useful for tracing dynamics of human population expansions, reconstructing ancestral cultures, and modeling transition rates of cultural traits over time.
methodsHere we investigate the Tupi expansion, a widely-dispersed language family in lowland South America, with a distance-based phylogeny based on 40-word vocabulary lists from 48 languages. We coded 11 cultural traits across the diverse Tupi family including traditional warfare patterns, post-marital residence, corporate structure, community size, paternity beliefs, sibling terminology, presence of canoes, tattooing, shamanism, men's houses, and lip plugs. RESULTS/DISCUSSION: The linguistic phylogeny supports a Tupi homeland in west-central Brazil with subsequent major expansions across much of lowland South America. Consistently, ancestral reconstructions of cultural traits over the linguistic phylogeny suggest that social complexity has tended to decline through time, most notably in the independent emergence of several nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Estimated rates of cultural change across the Tupi expansion are on the order of only a few changes per 10,000 years, in accord with previous cultural phylogenetic results in other language families around the world, and indicate a conservative nature to much of human culture.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.