Why We Should Care About the Radical Origins of Anthropology

Why We Should Care About the Radical Origins of Anthropolog

Norm violations and punishments across human societies

Punishments for norm violations are hypothesised to be a crucial component of the maintenance of cooperation in humans but are rarely studied from a comparative perspective. We investigated the degree to which punishment systems were correlated with socioecology and cultural history. We took data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database and coded ethnographic documents from a sample of 131 largely non-industrial societies. We recorded whether punishment for norm violations concerned adultery, religion, food, rape or war cowardice and whether sanctions were reputational, physical, material or execution. We used Bayesian phylogenetic regression modelling to test for culture-level covariation. We found little evidence of phylogenetic signals in evidence for punishment types, suggesting that punishment systems change relatively quickly over cultural evolutionary history. We found evidence that reputational punishment was associated with egalitarianism and the absence of food storage; material punishment was associated with the presence of food storage; physical punishment was moderately associated with greater dependence on hunting; and execution punishment was moderately associated with social stratification. Taken together, our results suggest that the role and kind of punishment vary both by the severity of the norm violation, but also by the specific socio-economic system of the society.Published versio

Modeling the Role of Networks and Individual Differences in Inter-Group Violence

There is significant heterogeneity within and between populations in their propensity to engage in conflict. Most research has neglected the role of within-group effects in social networks in contributing to between-group violence and focused instead on the precursors and consequences of violence, or on the role of between-group ties. Here, we explore the role of individual variation and of network structure within a population in promoting and inhibiting group violence towards other populations. Motivated by ethnographic observations of collective behavior in a small-scale society, we describe a model with differentiated roles for individuals embedded within friendship networks. Using a simple model based on voting-like dynamics, we explore several strategies for influencing group-level behavior. When we consider changing population level attitude changes and introducing control nodes separately, we find that a particularly effective control strategy relies on exploiting network degree. We also suggest refinements to our model such as tracking fine-grained information spread dynamics that can lead to further enrichment in using evolutionary game theory models for sociological phenomena

Why did foraging, horticulture and pastoralism persist after the Neolithic transition? The oasis theory of agricultural intensification

Despite the global spread of intensive agriculture, many populations retained foraging or mixed subsistence strategies until well into the twentieth century. Understanding why has been a longstanding puzzle. One explanation, called the marginal habitat hypothesis, is that foraging persisted because foragers tended to live in marginal habitats generally not suited to agriculture. However, recent empirical studies have not supported this view. The alternative but untested oasis hypothesis of agricultural intensification claims that intensive agriculture developed in areas with low biodiversity and a reliable water source not reliant on local rainfall. We test both the marginal habitat and oasis hypotheses using a cross-cultural sample drawn from the 'Ethnographic atlas' (Murdock 1967 Ethnology 6, 109–236). Our analyses provide support for both hypotheses. We found that intensive agriculture was unlikely in areas with high rainfall. Further, high biodiversity, including pathogens associated with high rainfall, appears to have limited the development of intensive agriculture. Our analyses of African societies show that tsetse flies, elephants and malaria are negatively associated with intensive agriculture, but only the effect of tsetse flies reached significance. Our results suggest that in certain ecologies intensive agriculture may be difficult or impossible to develop but that generally lower rainfall and biodiversity is favourable for its emergence

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution due to their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music

Norm violations and punishments across human societies

Punishments for norm violations are hypothesized to be a crucial component of the maintenance of cooperation in humans but are rarely studied from a comparative perspective. We investigated the degree to which punishment systems were correlated with socioecology and cultural history. We took data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database and coded ethnographic documents from a sample of 131 largely nonindustrial societies. We recorded whether punishment for norm violations concerned adultery, religion, food, rape, or war cowardice and whether sanctions were reputational, physical, material, or execution. We used Bayesian phylogenetic regression modeling to test for culture-level covariation. We found little evidence of phylogenetic signals in evidence for punishment types, suggesting punishment systems change relatively quickly over cultural evolutionary history. We found evidence that reputational punishment was associated with egalitarianism and the absence of food storage; material punishment was associated with the presence of food storage; physical punishment was moderately associated with greater dependence on hunting; and execution punishment was moderately associated with social stratification. Taken together, our results suggest that the role and kind of punishment vary both by the severity of the norm violation, but also by the specific socio-economic system of the society

Why We Should Care About the Radical Origins of Anthropology

Why We Should Care About the Radical Origins of Anthropolog

Incentives for War in Small-Scale Societies

This dissertation investigates why men in small-scale societies participate in warfare. The answer to this question has implications for understanding the role of war in our species’ history, as well as the evolution of cooperation. I explore this question through ethnographic research using data from small-scale societies. A central component of this research was undertaken through fieldwork among the Nyangatom, a group of pastoralists in East Africa still practicing small-scale warfare. Chapter One provides an introduction to the primary question of this dissertation. It also provides details on the methods used as well as background on the fieldwork I conducted. Chapter Two develops the cultural-rewards hypothesis, which posits that cultures encourage participation in warfare through the development of positive cultural incentives for warriors. It tests this hypothesis using cross-cultural data from 20 small-scale societies and shows a positive relationship between cultural reward systems and risk-taking in warfare. Chapter Three introduces the Nyangatom, a group of nomadic pastoralists living along the border of Ethiopia, South Sudan, and the Ilemi Triangle. Chapter Four provides a detailed ethnographic description of warfare among the Nyangatom, including the first documented account of many ritual elements in warfare for any Ateker group. Chapter Five focuses on the question of whether warriors have additional wives or children compared to other men. Over a lifetime, warriors who participated in more small livestock raids had a greater number of wives and children. Leaders of large raids, however, did not have an increased number of wives and children. Chapter Six evaluates the role of sanctions in motivating participation in raiding parties for three groups, including the Nyangatom. It shows a possibly important role of verbal sanctions for raiding party participation but provides little support for the importance of more serious sanctions. Chapter Seven summarizes the results of this dissertation and briefly sketches future research that will continue to explore the question of why individuals participate in intergroup conflict.Human Evolutionary Biolog