The complex life course of mobility: Quantitative description of 300,000 residential moves in 1850–1950 Netherlands

Mobility is a major mechanism of human adaptation, both in the deep past and in the present. Decades of research in the human evolutionary sciences have elucidated how much, how and when individuals and groups move in response to their ecology. Prior research has focused on small-scale subsistence societies, often in marginal environments and yielding small samples. Yet adaptive movement is commonplace across human societies, providing an opportunity to study human mobility more broadly. We provide a detailed, life-course structured demonstration, describing the residential mobility system of a historical population living between 1850 and 1950 in the industrialising Netherlands. We focus on how moves are patterned over the lifespan, attending to individual variation and stratifying our analyses by gender. We conclude that this population was not stationary: the median total moves in a lifetime were 10, with a wide range of variation and an uneven distribution over the life course. Mobility peaks in early adulthood (age 20-30) in this population, and this peak is consistent in all the studied cohorts, and both genders. Mobile populations in sedentary settlements provide a productive avenue for research on adaptive mobility and its relationship to human life history, and historical databases are useful for addressing evolutionarily motivated questions

Limited scope for group coordination in stylistic variations of kolam art

In large, complex societies, assorting with others with similar social norms or behaviors can facilitate successful coordination and cooperation. The ability to recognize others with shared norms or behaviors is thus assumed to be under selection. As a medium of communication, human art might reflect fitness-relevant information on shared norms and behaviors of other individuals thus facilitating successful coordination and cooperation.Distinctive styles or patterns of artistic design could signify migration history, different groups with a shared interaction history due to spatial proximity, as well as individual-level expertise and preferences. In addition, cultural boundaries may be even more pronounced in a highly diverse and socially stratified society. In the current study, we focus on a large corpus of an artistic tradition called kolam that is produced by women from Tamil Nadu in South India (N = 3,139 kolam drawings from 192 women) to test whether stylistic variations in art can be mapped onto caste boundaries, migration and neighborhoods. Since the kolam art system with its sequential drawing decisions can be described by a Markov process, we characterize variation in styles of art due to different facets of an artist's identity and the group affiliations, via hierarchical Bayesian statistical models.Our results reveal that stylistic variations in kolam art only weakly map onto caste boundaries, neighborhoods, and regional origin. In fact, stylistic variations or patterns in art are dominated by artist-level variation and artist expertise. Our results illustrate that although art can be a medium of communication, it is not necessarily marked by group affiliation. Rather, artistic behaviour in this context seems to be primarily a behavioral domain within which individuals carve out a unique niche for themselves to differentiate themselves from others. Our findings inform discussions on the evolutionary role of art for group coordination by encouraging researchers to use systematic methods to measure the mapping between specific objects or styles onto groups

Estimating the reproducibility of social learning research published between 1955 and 2018

Reproducibility is integral to science, but difficult to achieve. Previous research has quantified low rates of data availability and results reproducibility across the biological and behavioural sciences. Here, we surveyed 560 empirical publications, published between 1955 and 2018 in the social learning literature, a research topic that spans animal behaviour, behavioural ecology, cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. Data were recoverable online or through direct data requests for 30% of this sample. Data recovery declines exponentially with time since publication, halving every 6 years, and up to every 9 years for human experimental data. When data for a publication can be recovered, we estimate a high probability of subsequent data usability (87%), analytical clarity (97%) and agreement of published results with reproduced findings (96%). This corresponds to an overall rate of recovering data and reproducing results of 23%, largely driven by the unavailability or incompleteness of data. We thus outline clear measures to improve the reproducibility of research on the ecology and evolution of social behaviour

Navigating cross-cultural research: methodological and ethical considerations

Copyright © 2020 The Authors. The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study site selection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires of the community regarding research approach and methodology, community involvement, results communication and distribution, and data sharing are held in the highest regard by the researchers. We argue that such considerations are central to scientific rigour and the foundation of the study of human behaviour.Department of Human Behaviour, Ecology and Culture at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; French National Research Agency under the Investments for the Future (Investissements d'Avenir) programme (ANR-17-EURE-0010)

Comparative phylogenetic methods and the cultural evolution of medicinal plant use

Human life depends on plant biodiversity and the ways in which plants are used are culturally determined. Whilst anthropologists have used phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) to gain an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the evolution of political, religious, social, and material culture, plant use has been almost entirely neglected. Medicinal plants are of special interest because of their role in maintaining people’s health across the world. PCMs in particular, and cultural evolutionary theory in general, provide a framework in which to study the diversity of medicinal plant applications cross-culturally, and to infer changes in plant use through time. These methods can be applied to single medicinal plants as well as the entire set of plants used by a culture for medicine, and they account for the non-independence of data when testing for floristic, cultural or other drivers of plant use. With cultural, biological, and linguistic diversity under threat, gaining a deeper and broader understanding of the variation of medicinal plant use through time and space is pressing

Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals

Data, Materials, and Software Availability: All study data are included in the article and/or supporting information available online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.2220124120#supplementary-materials .Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while nevertheless falling within the mammalian range. Additionally, female reproductive skew is higher in polygynous human populations than in polygynous nonhumans mammals on average. This patterning of skew can be attributed in part to the prevalence of monogamy in humans compared to the predominance of polygyny in nonhuman mammals, to the limited degree of polygyny in the human societies that practice it, and to the importance of unequally held rival resources to women’s fitness. The muted reproductive inequality observed in humans appears to be linked to several unusual characteristics of our species—including high levels of cooperation among males, high dependence on unequally held rival resources, complementarities between maternal and paternal investment, as well as social and legal institutions that enforce monogamous norms.This work was conducted as a part of the “Emergence of Hierarchy and Leadership in Mammalian Societies” group at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, supported by NSF Award DBI-1300426 and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It was supported by NSF awards SMA-1329089 and SMA-1743019, and the Santa Fe Institute, as well as the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture. S.G. was supported by the US Army Research Office grants W911NF-14-1-0637, W911NF-17-1-0150, and the Office of Naval Research grant W911NF-18-1-0138. Additional funding for data collection was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research awards: 8913 and 7970, by NSF awards: BCS-0924630, BCS-0925910, BCS-0848360, BCS-0514559, BCS-0613226, BCS-0827277, SES-9870429, and DDRIG-1357209, by the National Geographic Society awards: HJ-099R-17, 20113909, 8671-09, and 7968-06, by the Kone Foundation awards: 086809, 088423, and 088423, and by the Jacobs Foundation, the UCSB Broom Center for Demography, and the UCSB Department of Anthropology