Evidence for Direct Evolutionary Linkages of Agriculture with Other Customs
Journal Title: Social Evolution & History - Year 2015, Vol 14, Issue 1
Abstract
In a world sample of diverse societies, geographical and other variations can cause misleading low or high correlations be-tween two customs when measured by scores of individual societies. Evolutionary linkage of agriculture with another custom can be inferred more accurately from differences be-tween paired nearby societies if the pair member that obtains more food from agriculture has either a higher or a lower score on the other custom in most of the pairs. A world sample of 186 societies contains 93 pairs of nearby societies. The pair member that obtained more food from agriculture usually had land transport assisted by animals or vehicles and obtained less food from domesticated animals. Other predominant customs of this pair member were choice of wife by adult relatives instead of by the adolescent boy, less premarital sexual freedom of adolescents, and less frequent corporal punishment of young children. Direct evolutionary linkage of food from agriculture with the associated customs might be attributable to the greater power and wealth obtained by owners of agricultural land.
Authors and Affiliations
Herbert Barry, III
Keywords
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