ArticleScience advances2025
Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies.
Article in Science advances, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies.Science advances · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Technology plays a central role in all human societies, from foraging to industrial economies. However, technological solutions come with associated costs, and in small-scale societies, technological complexity reflects this trade-off between efficiency and resource constraints. Here, we analyze this trade-off and show a sublinear scaling relationship between toolkit richness and tool part richness in ethnographic societies. This result indicates diminishing returns where each additional part contributes less to overall toolkit diversity. This scaling holds across diverse ecological and cultural contexts, suggesting a general principle of optimization in tool design. Ethnographic toolkits achieve their adaptability by reusing a core set of versatile parts and selectively incorporating more specialized parts. However, increasing richness also increases complexity, and complexity is costly. We formalize these dynamics within a combinatorial optimization framework and discuss the implications.
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.