ArticleRoyal Society open science2018
The global geography of human subsistence.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trends, stasis and trajectories for plant and animal domestications: possibilistic models alert on resource overexploitation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The global relevance of locally grounded ethnobiology.Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2024Article
- Climate, climate change and the global diversity of human houses.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Humanity's diverse predatory niche and its ecological consequences.Communications biology · 2023Article
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Pathways to social inequality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment.Nature human behaviour · 2020Article
- Cultural transmission and ecological opportunity jointly shaped global patterns of reliance on agriculture.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Cultural group selection and human cooperation: a conceptual and empirical review.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- The ecological drivers of variation in global language diversity.Nature communications · 2019Article
- The global geography of human subsistence.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How humans obtain food has dramatically reshaped ecosystems and altered both the trajectory of human history and the characteristics of human societies. Our species' subsistence varies widely, from predominantly foraging strategies, to plant-based agriculture and animal husbandry. The extent to which environmental, social and historical factors have driven such variation is currently unclear. Prior attempts to resolve long-standing debates on this topic have been hampered by an over-reliance on narrative arguments, small and geographically narrow samples, and by contradictory findings. Here we overcome these methodological limitations by applying multi-model inference tools developed in biogeography to a global dataset (818 societies). Although some have argued that unique conditions and events determine each society's particular subsistence strategy, we find strong support for a general global pattern in which a limited set of environmental, social and historical factors predicts an essential characteristic of all human groups: how we obtain our food.
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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.