ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2013
Risk, mobility or population size? Drivers of technological richness among contact-period western North American hunter-gatherers.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Identifying the necessary conditions for large populations to enhance cumulative culture.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies.Science advances · 2025Article
- Art beyond cognition: reframing Neanderthal art through social connectivity and cultural transmission.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- Institutional complexity emerges from socioecological complexity in small-scale human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Human major transitions from the perspective of distributed adaptations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Homo sapiens lithic technology and microlithization in the South Asian rainforest at Kitulgala Beli-lena (c. 45 - 8,000 years ago).PloS one · 2022Article
- Hunter-Gatherer Children's Object Play and Tool Use: An Ethnohistorical Analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Cultural evolution and prehistoric demography.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Demographic estimates from the Palaeolithic-Mesolithic boundary in Scandinavia: comparative benchmarks and novel insights.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- A multilevel analytical framework for studying cultural evolution in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2020Review
- 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
- Current and potential roles of archaeology in the development of cultural evolutionary theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- 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
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Identifying factors that influence technological evolution in small-scale societies is important for understanding human evolution. There have been a number of attempts to identify factors that influence the evolution of food-getting technology, but little work has examined the factors that affect the evolution of other technologies. Here, we focus on variation in technological richness (total number of material items and techniques) among recent hunter-gatherers from western North America and test three hypotheses: (i) technological richness is affected by environmental risk, (ii) population size is the primary determinant of technological richness, and (iii) technological richness is constrained by residential mobility. We found technological richness to be correlated with a proxy for environmental risk-mean rainfall for the driest month-in the manner predicted by the risk hypothesis. Support for the hypothesis persisted when we controlled for shared history and intergroup contact. We found no evidence that technological richness is affected by population size or residential mobility. These results have important implications for unravelling the complexities of technological evolution.
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