Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 113, Issue 16, Pages E2241-E2247Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1520288113
Keywords
cultural evolution; demography; Upper Paleolithic transition; Tasmania; cultural complexity
Categories
Funding
- The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (VIDI Grant) [016.144312]
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research of Canada
- Canada Research Chairs Program
- Canada Foundation for Innovation
- British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund
- Simon Fraser University
- Australian Research Council (Discovery Grant) [DP120100580]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Demography is increasingly being invoked to account for features of the archaeological record, such as the technological conservatism of the Lower and Middle Pleistocene, the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition, and cultural loss in Holocene Tasmania. Such explanations are commonly justified in relation to population dynamic models developed by Henrich [Henrich j (2004) Am Antiq 69: 197-214] and Powell et al. [Powell A, et al. (2009) Science 324(5932): 1298-1301], which appear to demonstrate that population size is the crucial determinant of cultural complexity. Here, we show that these models fail in two important respects. First, they only support a relationship between demography and culture in implausible conditions. Second, their predictions conflict with the available archaeological and ethnographic evidence. We conclude that new theoretical and empirical research is required to identify the factors that drove the changes in cultural complexity that are documented by the archaeological record.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available