Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Social and Cultural Anthropology

A Gene-Culture Co-Evolutionary Perspective on the Puzzle of Human Twinship

Augusto Dalla Ragione, Cody Ross, Daniel Redhead

Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution, Maternal and Child Health, Population Biology, Social and Cultural Anthropology

Natural selection should favor litter sizes that optimize trade-offs between brood-size and offspring viability. Across the primate order, modal litter size is one, suggesting a deep history of selection favoring minimal litters. Humans, however---despite having the longest juvenile period and slowest life-history of all primates---still produce twin-births at appreciable rates, even though such [...]

Beyond Darwin - the general evolutionary theory as unification of biological and cultural evolution

Erhard Glötzl

Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Evolution, Social and Cultural Anthropology

The general evolutionary theory can be seen as a comprehensive generalization and extension of Darwin's theory. The basic idea is to consider not only the evolution of genetic information - as Darwin did - but also the evolution of very general information. It shows that evolution is characterized by the fact that new types of information have developed in leaps and bounds, each with new storage [...]

The gene’s-eye view of culture

Nicolas Baumard, Léo Fitouchi, Jean-Baptiste André, et al.

Published: 2023-11-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology

Prestige bias in cultural evolutionary dynamics

Saar Egozi, Yoav Ram

Published: 2023-02-16
Subjects: Evolution, Life Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology

If the traits of more successful individuals are more likely to be adopted, the resulting cultural transmission is described as being success-biased. Prestige may be used as a proxy for success. Here, we model prestige bias as a combination of indirect success bias and influence bias, the latter meaning that the choice of a role-model depends on the number of individuals that have already copied [...]

Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the Worlds Most Enduring Mega-State

James Kai-sing Kung, Ömer Özak, Louis Putterman, et al.

Published: 2022-06-05
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Asian Studies, Comparative Politics, Economic History, Economics, Geography, Growth and Development, Human Geography, International and Area Studies, International Relations, Models and Methods, Nature and Society Relations, Other Anthropology, Other Economics, Other Political Science, Political Economy, Political Science, Regional Economics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology

We propose and test empirically a theory describing the endogenous formation and persistence of mega-states, using China as an example. We suggest that the relative timing of the emergence of agricultural societies, and their distance from each other, set off a race between their autochthonous state-building projects, which determines their extent and persistence. Using a novel dataset describing [...]

The Evolution of Peace

Luke Glowacki

Published: 2022-06-02
Subjects: Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology

While some species have affiliative and even cooperative interactions between individuals of different social groups, humans are alone in having durable, positive-sum, interdependent relationships across unrelated social groups. Our capacity to have harmonious relationships that cross group boundaries is an important aspect of our species’ success, allowing for the exchange of ideas, materials, [...]

Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model

Manvir Singh, Luke Glowacki

Published: 2021-03-13
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology

Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the [...]

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