ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2012
Cultural macroevolution on neighbor graphs : vertical and horizontal transmission among Western North American Indian societies.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Patterns of genetic admixture reveal similar rates of borrowing across diverse scenarios of language contact.Science advances · 2025Article
- Institutional complexity emerges from socioecological complexity in small-scale human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
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- Contact-tracing in cultural evolution: a Bayesian mixture model to detect geographic areas of language contact.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Ecological variation and institutionalized inequality in hunter-gatherer societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Quantifying the spatial pattern of dialect words spreading from a central population.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Cultural evolution of military camouflage.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- 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
- Problems modelling behavioural variation across Western North American Indian societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Behavioural variation in 172 small-scale societies indicates that social learning is the main mode of human adaptation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- What can cross-cultural correlations teach us about human nature?Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2014Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
What are the driving forces of cultural macroevolution, the evolution of cultural traits that characterize societies or populations? This question has engaged anthropologists for more than a century, with little consensus regarding the answer. We develop and fit autologistic models, built upon both spatial and linguistic neighbor graphs, for 44 cultural traits of 172 societies in the Western North American Indian (WNAI) database. For each trait, we compare models including or excluding one or both neighbor graphs, and for the majority of traits we find strong evidence in favor of a model which uses both spatial and linguistic neighbors to predict a trait's distribution. Our results run counter to the assertion that cultural trait distributions can be explained largely by the transmission of traits from parent to daughter populations and are thus best analyzed with phylogenies. In contrast, we show that vertical and horizontal transmission pathways can be incorporated in a single model, that both transmission modes may indeed operate on the same trait, and that for most traits in the WNAI database, accounting for only one mode of transmission would result in a loss of information.
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