Environmental factors drive language density more in food-producing than in hunter-gatherer populations.

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 de

SUBMITTER: Derungs C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6125899 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature