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There are a number of theories about where cultural differences come from. Some social scientists point to the role of specific institutions, like the Catholic Church. Others focus on historical differences in philosophical traditions across societies, or on the kinds of crops that were historically grown in different regions.
But there’s another possible answer. In a growing number of cases, researchers have found that human culture can be shaped by key features of the environments in which people live.
Just how strong is this ecology-culture connection overall? In a new study, ourlab, the Culture and Ecology Lab at Arizona State University, set out to answer this question.
Ecology includes basic physical and social characteristics of the environment – such factors as how abundant resources are, how common infectious diseases are, how densely populated a place is, and how much threat there is to human safety. Variables like temperature and the availability of water can be key ecological features.
What impact does a dry climate have on the culture of the people who live in it? Peter Adams/Stone via Getty Images
The three examples of cultural differences we started with illustrate how this can work. It turns out that the strength of social norms in a given culture is linked to the amount of threat, from such factors as war and disasters, a society faces. Stronger rules may help members of a society stick together and cooperate in the face of these dangers.
Places with less access to water tend to be more future-oriented. When fresh water is scarce, the thinking goes, there is more need to plan so that it doesn’t run out.
And in places with colder temperatures people feel less need for lots of personal space in public, perhaps because there tend to be fewer germs, or maybe from an impulse, on some basic level, to keep warm.
All of these examples show that cultures are shaped, at least in part, by the basic features of the environments people live in. And in fact, there are many other examples in which researchers have linked particular cultural differences to particular differences in ecology.
For over 200 societies, we gathered comprehensive data on nine key features of ecology – such as rainfall, temperature, infectious disease and population density – and dozens of aspects of human cultural variation – including values, strength of norms, personality, motivation and institutional characteristics. With this information, we created the open-access EcoCultural Dataset.
Using this data set, we were able to generate a range of estimates for just how much of human cultural variation can be explained by ecology.
We ran a series of statistical models looking at the relationship between our ecological variables and each of the 66 cultural outcomes we tracked. For each of the cultural outcomes, we calculated the average amount of the cultural diversity across societies that was explained by this combination of nine different ecological factors. We found that nearly 20% of cultural variation was explained by the combination of these ecological features.
Importantly, our statistical estimates take into account common issues in cross-cultural research. One complicating factor is that societies that are close to each other in space will be similar in ways beyond the variables measured in any particular study. In the same way, there will likely be unmeasured similarities between societies with shared historical roots. For example, cultural similarities between southern Germany and Austria may be accounted for by their shared cultural and linguistic heritage, as well as similar climates and levels of wealth.
Twenty percent may not sound impressive, but in fact this is several times larger than the average effect in our field of social psychology, in which typically up to around 4% or 5% of the variation in an outcome is explained.
Population density is one factor that can leave its mark on a place’s culture. Photo Patrick Altmann/Moment via Getty Images
In testing over 600 relationships among features of ecology and culture, we identified a number of intriguing new relationships. For example, we found that the amount of variation over time in levels of infectious disease was linked to the strength of social norms. This link suggests that it’s not just places with high levels of threat from germs, but also places where that threat varies more over time, such as India, that have stricter social rules.
There’s also a growing body of research suggesting that as the ecology of a place changes, so too does the culture. For example, a general decline in rates of infectious disease in the U.S., up until the current pandemic, is correlated with a loosening of social norms over the past century. Similarly, increases in population density appear to be linked to declines in birth rates around the world in the past several decades.
Because the EcoCultural Dataset contains not only contemporary measures of ecology, but also information about their variability and predictability over time, we believe it will be a rich resource for other scholars to mine. We’ve made all of this data free for anyone to accessand explore.
Ecology isn’t the only reason people around the world think and behave differently. But our work suggests that, at least in part, our environments shape our cultures.
Alexandra Wormley, Ph.D. Student in Social Psychology, Arizona State University and Michael Varnum, Associate Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Rising Star Cave is an exceptional resource for exploring the origins of our species. However, archaeological work at the site has been some of the mostcontroversial in the discipline.
Threenewstudies made available today (as pre-prints awaiting peer review) claim to have found evidence Homo naledi intentionally buried their dead (a sophisticated practice we usually associate with Homo sapiens) and made rock art, which suggests advanced cognitive abilities.
However, as archaeologists who investigate early humans in Africa, we’re not convinced the new research stacks up.
The research purports to have evidence Homo naledi undertook deliberate burial of their dead – a major claim.
So far, the earliest secure evidence for burial in Africa comes from the Panga ya Saidi cave site in eastern Kenya, excavated by our team and dated to 78,000 years ago. This burial of a Homo sapiens child meets rigorous criteria agreed upon by the scientific community for identifying intentional human burial.
The aim of the criteria is to help differentiate burial from other practices and phenomena that could lead to the depositing of human remains. These include, for example, the natural accumulation of skeletal parts in a predator’s cavern, or the kind of carrying and protecting of dead bodies observed among cognitively advanced non-human species such as gorillas and chimpanzees.
The claimed Homo naledi burials precede the Panga ya Saidi burial evidence by as much as 160,000 years. If the claim is correct, it significantly pushes back evidence for advanced mortuary behavior in Africa. It also implies intentional burial wasn’t limited to our species or other big-brained hominins.
Such a finding would force us to rethink the role of brain size in advanced “meaning-making” cognition, as well as what distinguishes our species from our ancestors.
But is there actually evidence for funerary behaviour at Rising Star Cave? According to standards set by the palaeoanthropology community, the evidence presented so far indicates no.
The site’s researchers claim to have evidence for three intentional burials.
However, not one of the burials provides compelling evidence of a deliberately excavated pit. Indeed, the shallow cavities may not be dug pits at all, but natural depressions where the bodies accumulated and were later disturbed by trampling, or partial cave collapse.
The alleged burials also fail to meet another fundamental criteria for deliberate burials: anatomical alignment of the body and articulation of skeletal remains.
In a deliberate burial, the body is generally intact and any minimal displacement can be explained by decomposition. That’s because burial involves immediately covering the body with soil, which protects the anatomical integrity of the skeleton.
Rising Star Cave so far hasn’t produced evidence for anything other than the general spatial association of some skeletal elements. At most, it provides evidence for the in-situ decomposition of particular body parts, such as an ankle, and partial hand and foot articulations.
Moreover, confirming intentional burial in the past has required the presentation of human remains in an arrangement that can’t have been achieved by chance. However, the scattered distribution of the remains at Rising Star prevents reconstruction of their original positions.
Other claimed evidence for funerary behavior is equally uncompelling. A stone artifact supposedly included in the burial as a “grave good” is said to have scratches and edge serrations from use. But this so-called artefact’s shape suggests it may be natural. It’s still encased in sediment and has only been studied through synchrotron X-ray.
The purported stone artefact (from synchrotron X-ray) showing so-called scratches and edge serrations may actually be a natural rock and not culturally modified. Lee Berger et al, CC BY-SA
But perhaps the biggest barrier to confirming the status of the findings is that so far none of the alleged burials have been fully excavated. It’s therefore impossible to assess the completeness of the bodies, their original position, and the limits of the purported pits.
An equally splashy claim made in one of the publications is that Homo naledi left rock art on the walls of Rising Star Cave.
The report describes engravings in the form of deeply impressed cross-hatchings and geometric shapes such as squares, triangles, crosses and X’s. Further claims are made about the preparation of and potential repeated handling or rubbing of the associated rock surface, and the use of a similar “tool” to the one they claim was found with the alleged burial.
The researchers point to engravings in the wall as evidence of Homo naledi’s capability to create art and symbols. But these etchings haven’t been dated, and some of the lines look relatively recently etched. Lee Berger et al, CC BY
This claim has major implications. To date, rock art has only reliably been linked to Homo sapiens and, in rarer cases, some of our large-brained ancestors. Similar to deliberate burial, producing rock art has major implications for the cognitive abilities of a species. It denotes a capacity for representation, and the creation and communication of meaning via abstract symbols.
The problem with the rock art at Rising Star Cave is that it’s undated. To imply any link with Homo naledi requires firm dates. This could be achieved through using dating techniques on associated residues or natural deposits covering the art, or by studying materials from excavated and dated archaeological layers that can be linked to the art (for instance, if they contain engraving tools or engraved rock fall fragments).
In the absence of dating, it’s simply spurious to claim the engravings were made by Homo naledi, rather than by another species (and potentially at a much later date).
The researchers also claim the mortuary and engraving activities in Rising Star Cave involved strategic use of fire for illumination.
In public lectures and on social media they clarify they have found new evidence for hearths, including charcoal, ash, discoloured clay and burned animal bones. Yet none of the scientific research needed to confirm the use of fire has been carried out. Or if it has, it hasn’t been published.
Previously acquired radiocarbon dates obtained by the site investigators on the apparent hearth material provided very late dates that distanced the hearths from the remains of Homo naledi by several hundred thousand years.
We’re not opposed to the idea that the Rising Star Cave witnessed precocious mortuary behavior involving the intentional disposal of bodies by Homo naledi. But it’s clear the latest inferences require further investigation before they’re accepted by the broader scientific community.
Michael Petraglia, Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University; Emmanuel K. Ndiema, Senior Research Scientist, National Museums of Kenya; MarĂa MartinĂłn-Torres, CENIEH Director, Atapuerca Research Team and author of "Homo imperfectus" (Ed. Destino), Centro Nacional de InvestigaciĂłn sobre la EvoluciĂłn Humana (CENIEH), and Nicole Boivin, Professor, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
