ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
On the absence of a correlation between population size and 'toolkit size' in ethnographic hunter-gatherers.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Forward and backward modeling of cultural evolutionary processes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross-Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
In apparent contradiction to the theoretically predicted effect of population size on the quality/quantity of material culture, statistical analyses on ethnographic hunter-gatherers have shown an absence of correlation between population size and toolkit size. This has sparked a heated, if sometimes tangential, debate as to the usefulness of the theoretical models and as to what modes of cultural transmission humans are capable of and hunter-gatherers rely on. I review the directly relevant theoretical literature and argue that much of the confusion is caused by a mismatch between the theoretical variable and the empirical observable. I then confirm that a model incorporating the appropriate variable does predict a positive association between population size and toolkit size for random oblique, vertical, best-of-
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