ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Women's mental health: current status and evolutionary perspectives.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Review
- Demography of grandmothering: a case study in Agta foragers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Contemporary small-scale subsistence populations offer unique insights into human musculoskeletal health and aging.Science advances · 2024Review
- Young adults' desired life tradeoffs: love first, sex last.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Alcohol consumption, life history and extinction risk among Raute hunter-gatherers from Nepal.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
43 authors at 20 institutions in 9 countries.
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Abstract
While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities-incorporating market integration-are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found considerable variation in fertility. This variation did not align with group-level subsistence typologies. Societies labeled as "farmers" did not have higher fertility than others, while "foragers" did not have lower fertility. However, at the individual level, we found strong evidence that fertility was positively associated with farming and moderate evidence of a negative relationship between foraging and fertility. Markers of market integration were strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Despite strong cross-cultural evidence, these relationships were not consistent in all populations, highlighting the importance of the socioecological context, which likely influences the diverse mechanisms driving the relationship between fertility and subsistence.
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Registered trials
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