ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Environmental factors drive language density more in food-producing than in hunter-gatherer populations.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 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
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Curating global datasets of structural linguistic features for independence.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Global language geography and language history: challenges and opportunities.Open research Europe · 2024Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Article
- ALS/FTD: Evolution, Aging, and Cellular Metabolic Exhaustion.Frontiers in neurology · 2022Article
- The geography and development of language isolates.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Can Bayesian phylogeography reconstruct migrations and expansions in linguistic evolution?Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Diversity begets diversity in mammal species and human cultures.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
- The ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Drivers of geographical patterns of North American language diversity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Linguistic diversity is a key aspect of human population diversity and shapes much of our social and cognitive lives. To a considerable extent, the distribution of this diversity is driven by environmental factors such as climate or coast access. An unresolved question is whether the relevant factors have remained constant over time. Here, we address this question at a global scale. We approximate the difference between pre- versus post-Neolithic populations by the difference between modern hunter-gatherer versus food-producing populations. Using a novel geostatistical approach of estimating language and language family densities, we show that environmental-chiefly climate factors-have driven the language density of food-producing populations considerably more strongly than the language density of hunter-gatherer populations. Current evidence suggests that the population dynamics of modern hunter-gatherers is very similar to that of what can be reconstructed from the Palaeolithic record. Based on this, we cautiously infer that the impact of environmental factors on language densities underwent a substantial change with the transition to agriculture. After this transition, the environmental impact on language diversity in food-producing populations has remained relatively stable since it can also be detected-albeit in slightly weaker form-in models that capture the reduced linguistic diversity during large-scale language spreads in the Mid-Holocene.
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.