Political complexity predicts the spread of ethnolinguistic groups

Abstract

Human languages show a remarkable degree of variation in the area they cover. However, the factors governing the distribution of human cultural groups such as languages are not well understood. While previous studies have examined the role of a number of environmental variables the importance of cultural factors has not been systematically addressed. Here we use a geographical information system (GIS) to integrate information about languages with environmental, ecological, and ethnographic data to test a number of hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the global distribution of languages. We show that the degree of political complexity and type of subsistence strategy exhibited by societies are important predictors of the area covered by a language. Political complexity is also strongly associated with the latitudinal gradient in language area, whereas subsistence strategy is not. We argue that a process of cultural group selection favoring more complex societies may have been important in shaping the present-day global distribution of language diversity.cultural diversity ͉ cultural evolution ͉ cultural group selection ͉ language diversity ͉ latitudinal gradient

The Evolution of the Diversity of Cultures

“…Birdsell [44] was among the first to show this for Australia; in the past decade or so, similar patterns have been shown for languages globally [12], within Africa [15], in North America [13], and for cultures globally [14] and in relation to political complexity [45]. In broad terms, the pattern found is one that replicates many of the species-area relationships for other mammals, with greater diversity in tropical regions and in areas with high productivity.…”

River density and landscape roughness are universal determinants of linguistic diversity

“…On the other hand, cultural variables are expected to be of relevance, as previous studies suggest. The spread of linguistic groups, for instance, has been shown to depend on political complexity [25], this being a variable that would be worth including in an extended analysis of global LD. Other recent historical factors such as warfare and colonization, and ecological variables such as pathogens may have been relevant in shaping LD in particular regions.…”

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

“…Even avowedly secular national and transnational movements retain many agentive (anthropomorphic) and transcendental (sacred) aspects of traditional religions (Anderson 1991): nations ritually mourn, rejoice, and demand sacrifice, and the "naturalness" of causes that defy prior human history (universal justice, equality, and liberty) is anything but empirically or logically self-evident (Atran 2010). As we argue that sociopolitical complexity coevolved with both commitment-inducing rituals and beliefs in high moralizing gods, our efforts also dovetail with recent work indicating that cultural group selection, driven by differences in sociopolitical complexity, is crucial to understanding the global distribution and diversity of languages (Currie and Mace 2009).…”