Abstract
Modeling work suggests that population size affects cultural evolution such that larger populations can be expected to have richer and more complex cultural repertoires than smaller populations. Empirical tests of this hypothesis, however, have yielded conflicting results. Here, we report a study in which we investigated whether the subsistence toolkits of small-scale food-producers are influenced by population size in the manner the hypothesis predicts. We applied simple linear and standard multiple regression analysis to data from 40 nonindustrial farming and pastoralist groups to test the hypothesis. Results were consistent with predictions of the hypothesis: both the richness and the complexity of the toolkits of the food-producers were positively and significantly influenced by population size in the simple linear regression analyses. The multiple regression analyses demonstrated that these relationships are independent of the effects of risk of resource failure, which is the other main factor that has been found to influence toolkit richness and complexity in nonindustrial groups. Thus, our study strongly suggests that population size influences cultural evolution in nonindustrial food-producing populations.
Highlights
It has long been recognized that culture is central to the adaptive success of humans [e.g., 1,2], yet only in the last few decades have substantive efforts been made to develop an explicitly Darwinian approach to the study of culture [e.g., 3–17]
Shennan [18], for example, has shown with the aid of a population genetics model that larger populations have an advantage over smaller ones when it comes to cultural innovation because of the decreasing role of sampling effects as populations get larger
The analyses suggest that population size impacts toolkit richness and complexity among small-scale food-producing populations in the manner predicted by the population size hypothesis
Summary
It has long been recognized that culture is central to the adaptive success of humans [e.g., 1,2], yet only in the last few decades have substantive efforts been made to develop an explicitly Darwinian approach to the study of culture [e.g., 3–17]. Henrich [19] has demonstrated that population size can affect the probability of more complex skills being invented and maintained In his model, learners preferentially copy the most skilled practitioner with some amount of error. The probability distribution that determines the amount of error is such that a learner will only occasionally arrive at behavior that gives a better result than the previous best. The likelihood of this occurring is partly dependent on population size because in large populations even improbable events occur occasionally and the larger the population, the more likely this is. Other authors who have reported modeling work that suggests population size can affect cultural evolution include Powell et al [20], Premo and Kuhn [21], Mesoudi [22], and Kobayashi and Aoki [23]
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