Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution.

ABSTRACT: Many important and interesting hypotheses about cultural evolution are evaluated using cross-cultural correlations: if knowing one particular feature of a culture (e.g. environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity or parasite load) allows you to predict other features (e.g. language features, religious beliefs, cuisine), it is often interpreted as indicating a causal link between the two (e.g. hotter climates carry greater disease risk, which encourages belief in supernatural forces and favours the use of antimicrobial ingredients in food preparation; dry climates make the production of distinct tones more difficult). However, testing such hypotheses from cross-cultural comparisons requires us to take proximity of cultures into account: nearby cultures share many aspects of their

SUBMITTER: Bromham L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10565196 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature