Abstract
This article presents a cross-cultural study of the relationship among the subsistence strategies, the environmental setting and the food sharing practices of 22 modern small-scale societies located in America (n = 18) and Siberia (n = 4). Ecological, geographical and economic variables of these societies were extracted from specialized literature and the publicly available D-PLACE database. The approach proposed comprises a variety of quantitative methods, ranging from exploratory techniques aimed at capturing relationships of any type between variables, to network theory and supervised-learning predictive modelling. Results provided by all techniques consistently show that the differences observed in food sharing practices across the sampled populations cannot be explained just by the differential distribution of ecological, geographical and economic variables. Food sharing has to be interpreted as a more complex cultural phenomenon, whose variation over time and space cannot be ascribed only to local adaptation.
Highlights
The relationship between species and their environment constitutes a recurring subject matter
With respect to the state-of-the-art analysis conducted in the section entitled “Sharing practices background”, it is important to note that our contribution presents three main differential aspects: (1) it employs Caro’s systematic description of sharing practices [27], which enables to compare the food sharing sequences of different human societies, and to compute quantitative measures to assess the possible relationships between groups in terms of their mutual overlap in sharing practices; (2) it studies human food sharing behaviour from a crosscultural perspective instead of a local one,; (3) it implements last generation quantitative analysis techniques
The details of the multiple comparison corrections can be found in Supporting Information S2 Appendix, where first the value obtained with the two conservative approaches is presented (Bonferroni and Sidàk), and Table B collects the p-values corrected according to more flexible approaches (Holm, Hochberg, Hommel, Benjamini & Hochberg, Benjamini & Yekutieli)
Summary
The relationship between species and their environment constitutes a recurring subject matter. Research disciplines such as Behavioural Ecology (BE) and Human Behavioural Ecology (HBE) emerged to provide scientific insights into this issue. BE investigates how behaviour evolves in relation to ecological conditions, considering these as both the physical and social aspects of the environment [1]. BE has two main lines of investigation: (i) the analysis of how measurable variation in ecological conditions predicts. Relationship between food sharing practices and socio-ecological variables in small-scale societies (DZ, JC, MM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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