ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Population size does not explain past changes in cultural complexity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Opaque Social Instruments: A Cultural Evolutionary Approach to Pleistocene Symbolic Artifacts.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Article
- Identifying the necessary conditions for large populations to enhance cumulative culture.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Modelling effects of inter-group contact on links between population size and cultural complexity.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Human societal development: is it an evolutionary transition in individuality?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- 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
- Human major transitions from the perspective of distributed adaptations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Population trends and the transition to agriculture: Global processes as seen from North America.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Quantifying the scientific revolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Paleoeconomy more than demography determined prehistoric human impact in Arctic Norway.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- A cultural evolutionary theory that explains both gradual and punctuated change.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Modeling how population size drives the evolution of birdsong, a functional cultural trait.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Sustainable human population density in Western Europe between 560.000 and 360.000 years ago.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Cultural selection and biased transformation: two dynamics of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Cultural evolution and prehistoric demography.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- Article
- Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Ecological Changes, Social Behaviour and Human Intergroup Tolerance 300,000 to 30,000 BP.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2021Article
- The fundamentals of cultural adaptation: implications for human adaptation.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Demography is increasingly being invoked to account for features of the archaeological record, such as the technological conservatism of the Lower and Middle Pleistocene, the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition, and cultural loss in Holocene Tasmania. Such explanations are commonly justified in relation to population dynamic models developed by Henrich [Henrich J (2004)Am Antiq69:197-214] and Powell et al. [Powell A, et al. (2009)Science324(5932):1298-1301], which appear to demonstrate that population size is the crucial determinant of cultural complexity. Here, we show that these models fail in two important respects. First, they only support a relationship between demography and culture in implausible conditions. Second, their predictions conflict with the available archaeological and ethnographic evidence. We conclude that new theoretical and empirical research is required to identify the factors that drove the changes in cultural complexity that are documented by the archaeological record.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.