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Across the world people in different societies structure their family relationships in many different ways. These relationships become encoded in their languages as kinship terminology, a word set that maps variably onto a vast genealogical grid of kinship categories, each of which could in principle vary independently. But the observed diversity of kinship terminology is considerably smaller than the enormous theoretical design space. For the past century anthropologists have captured this variation in typological schemes with only a small number of model system types. Whether those types exhibit the internal co-selection of parts implicit in their use is an outstanding question, as is the sufficiency of typologies in capturing variation as a whole. We interrogate the coherence of classic kinship typologies using modern statistical approaches and systematic data from a new database, Kinbank. We first survey the canonical types and their assumed patterns of internal and external co-selection, then present two data-driven approaches to assess internal coherence. Our first analysis reveals that across parents’ and ego’s (one’s own) generation, typology has limited predictive value: knowing the system in one generation does not reliably predict the other. Though we detect limited co-selection between generations, “disharmonic” systems are equally common. Second, we represent structural diversity with a novel multidimensional approach we term kinship space. This approach reveals, for ego’s generation, some broad patterning consistent with the canonical typology, but diversity (and mixed systems) is considerably higher than classical typologies suggest. Our results strongly challenge the descriptive adequacy of the set of canonical kinship types. Introduction Classic Typologies of Kinship - Hawaiian - Eskimo - Dravidian Systems - Sudanese Systems - Crow/Omaha - The Classic Typology: Recap Our Database - Languages - Kin Types Testing Typological Cohesion: Clearing the Ground with New Data Testing Typological Cohesion: Introducing New Methods - Creating the Kinship Space - Interpreting the Kinship Space -- Cluster Identification -- Eskimo -- Cross-parallal and Sudanese -- Hawaiian Conclusions: On the Internal Coherence of Canonical Types

Human kinship systems play a central role in social organization, as anthropologists have long demonstrated. Much less is known about how cultural schemas of relatedness are transmitted across generations. How do children learn kinship concepts? To what extent is learning affected by known cross-cultural variation in how humans classify kin? This review draws on research in developmental psychology, linguistics, and anthropology to present our current understanding of the social and cognitive foundations of kinship categorization. Amid growing interest in kinship in the cognitive sciences, the paper aims to stimulate new research on the ontogeny of kinship categorization, a rich domain for studying the nexus of language, culture, and cognition. We introduce an interdisciplinary research toolkit to help streamline future research in this area.

Prestige is a key concept across the social and behavioral sciences and has been implicated as an important driver in the processes governing human learning and behavior and the evolution of culture. However, existing scales of prestige fail to account for the full breadth of its potential determinants or focus only on collective social institutions rather than the individual-level perceptions that underpin everyday social interactions. Here, we use open, extensible methods to unite diverse theoretical ideas into a common measurement tool for individual prestige. Participants evaluated the perceived prestige of regional variations in accented speech using a pool of candidate scale items generated from free-listing tasks and a review of published scales. Through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we find that our resulting 7-item scale, composed of dimensions we term position, reputation, and information (“PRI”), exhibits good model fit, scale validity, and scale reliability. The PRI scale of individual prestige contributes to the integration of existing lines of theory on the concept of prestige, and the scale’s application in Western samples and its extensibility to other cultural contexts serves as a foundation for new theoretical and experimental trajectories across the social and behavioral sciences. Introduction Methods and results: Ethics statement ; Scale construction (study 1) ; Scale evaluation (study 2) ; Scale validity and reliability Discussion

Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to design future research. We present design goals, a formal specification, and an implementation for this database. Source code is freely available for other fields to take advantage of this tool. Some initial results are presented, including identifying conflicts in theories about gossip and ritual, comparing hypotheses relating population size and morphological complexity, and an author relation network. European Research Council (ERC) 639291 Academy of Finland 296212 European Research Council (ERC) 805371 Australian Research Council FL130100111 Leverhulme Trust CF-2016-435 Australian Research Council FL130100141 John Templeton Fund 40128

This topic addresses a question of key interest to cognitive science, namely which factors may have triggered, constrained, or shaped the course of cognitive evolution. It highlights the relevance of culture as a driving force in this process, with a special focus on social learning and language, conceptual tools, and material culture. In so doing, the topic combines two goals: to provide an overview of current empirical and theoretical work leading this field, tailored for a wider cognitive science audience, and to investigate the potential for integrating multiple perspectives across several timescales and levels of analysis, from the microlevel of individual behavior to the macrolevel of cultural change and language diversification. One key purpose is to assess the extent to which the different research approaches can cross‐fertilize each other, thereby also contributing to the advancement of cognitive science more broadly. acceptedVersion

Resumo Este estudo explora o sistema de terminologia de parentesco da língua Proto-Tupí-Guaraní (PTG) a partir de uma perspectiva interdisciplinar, que soma contribuições da Etnologia, da Linguística Histórica e dos trabalhos etnográficos realizados com povos Tupí-Guaraní. Fazem-se inferências sobre pré-história cultural utilizando métodos filogenéticos comparativos, um conjunto de ferramentas computacionais para explorar mudanças evolutivas em populações relacionadas, aplicados a um banco de dados de termos de parentesco em 24 línguas Tupí-Guaraní. Discute-se a amostra usada no estudo, os procedimentos de codificação adotados para dados tipológicos e os componentes, valores iniciais e premissas do modelo evolutivo. A análise de reconstrução de estados ancestrais baseada no critério de máxima parcimônia reconstrói vários traços tipológicos do sistema de parentesco do PTG, como: fusão e bifurcação na primeira geração ascendente (+1); distinções na terminologia de irmãos baseadas na idade relativa e no sexo do ego; e equação terminológica entre irmãos e primos paralelos. O estudo avalia o estado atual da reconstrução de formas linguísticas para termos de parentesco em PTG e mapeia estas formas no sistema inferido por análise comparativa. Este estudo de comprovação de conceito demonstra a utilidade de análise filogenética para inferir estruturas de sistemas de parentesco em comunidades linguísticas ancestrais. Abstract This study explores the kinship terminology of Proto-Tupí-Guaraní (PTG) through an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on ethnology, historical linguistics, and the ethnography of Tupi-Guaranian peoples. Inferences about cultural prehistory are made through phylogenetic comparative methods, a suite of computational tools for exploring evolutionary change in related populations, applied to a dataset of kinship terms from 24 Tupi-Guaranian languages. The study outlines the coding procedure for typological data, along with the parameters, inputs, and assumptions of the evolutionary models. Parsimony-based ancestral state inference is used to reconstruct a number of typological features of the kinship system of PTG, such as fusion and bifurcation in the first ascending generation (+1), relative age and sex-based distinctions in sibling terminology, and terminological equation between siblings and parallel cousins. The current state of reconstruction of the linguistic forms for kinship terms in PTG is reviewed, and these forms are mapped onto the system inferred through comparative analysis. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates the utility of phylogenetic analysis for inferring kinship structures in ancestral language communities.

Where a newly-married couple lives, termed post-marital residence, varies cross-culturally and changes over time. While many factors have been proposed as drivers of this change, among them general features of human societies like warfare, migration and gendered division of subsistence labour, little is known about whether changes in residence patterns exhibit global regularities. Here, we study ethnographic observations of post-marital residence in societies from five large language families (Austronesian, Bantu, Indo-European, Pama-Nyungan and Uto-Aztecan), encompassing 371 ethnolinguistic groups ranging widely in local ecologies and lifeways, and covering over half the world's population and geographical area. We apply Bayesian comparative methods to test the hypothesis that post-marital residence patterns have evolved in similar ways across different geographical regions. By reconstructing past post-marital residence states, we compare transition rates and models of evolution across groups, while integrating the historical descent relationships of human societies. We find that each language family possesses its own best fitting model, demonstrating that the mode and pace of post-marital residence evolution is lineage-specific rather than global.

In their recent paper on “Challenges in mathematical cognition”, Alcock and colleagues (Alcock et al. [2016]. Challenges in mathematical cognition: A collaboratively-derived research agenda. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 2, 20-41) defined a research agenda through 26 specific research questions. An important dimension of mathematical cognition almost completely absent from their discussion is the cultural constitution of mathematical cognition. Spanning work from a broad range of disciplines – including anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science, history of science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology – we argue that for any research agenda on mathematical cognition the cultural dimension is indispensable, and we propose a set of exemplary research questions related to it. publishedVersion

This research was funded by the European Research Council's Horizon 2020 programme under Starting Grant no. 639291 VARIKIN to F.M.J. Languages do not replace their vocabularies at an even rate: words endure longer if they are used more frequently. This effect, which has parallels in evolutionary biology, has been demonstrated for the core vocabulary, a set of common, unrelated meanings. The extent to which it replicates in closed lexical classes remains to be seen, and may indicate how general this effect is in language change. Here, we use phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate the history of 10 kinship categories, a type of closed lexical class of content words, across 47 Indo-European languages. We find that their rate of replacement is correlated with their usage frequency, and this relationship is stronger than in the case of the core vocabulary, even though the envelope of variation is comparable across the two cases. We also find that the residual variation in the rate of replacement of kinship terms is related to genealogical distance of referent to kin. We argue that this relationship is the result of social changes and corresponding shifts in the entire semantic class of kinship terms, shifts typically not present in the core vocabulary. Thus, an understanding of the scope and limits of social change is needed to understand changes in kinship systems, and broader context is necessary to model cultural evolution in particular and the process of system change in general. Publisher PDF

Human populations display remarkable diversity in language and culture, but the variation is not without limit. At the population level, variation between societies may be structured by a range of macro‐evolutionary factors, including ecological and environmental resources, shared ancestry, spatial proximity, and covarying social practices. Kinship terminology systems are varying linguistic paradigms that denote familial social relationships of kin and non‐kin. Systems vary by the kinds of salient distinctions that are made (e.g., age, gender, generation) and the extent to which different kinds of kin are called by the same term. Here, we explore two kinds of explanations for an observed typology of kin terms for cousins. The first one derives the typology from a learning bottleneck linked to population size. This would lead to a correlation between community size and the type of kinship system. The second one derives it from a set of social practices, particularly marriage and transfer of resources that might shape kinship systems. Using a global ethnographic database of over a thousand societies, we show that marriage rules and shared linguistic affiliation have a significant influence on the type of kinship system found in a society. This remains true if we control for the effect of spatial proximity and cultural ancestry. By combining cognitive and historic approaches to this aspect of kinship, we suggest broader implications for the study of human social cognition in general., Kinship terminologies are basic cognitive semantic systems that all human societies use for organizing kin relations. Diversity in kinship systems and their categories is substantial, but constrained. Rácz, Passmore, and Jordan explore hypotheses about such constraints from learning theories and social pressures, testing the impact of a community‐size driven learning bottleneck against the social coordination demands of different kinds of marriage and resource systems.

Kinship is a fundamental and universal aspect of the structure of human society. The kinship category of ‘grandparents’ is socially salient, owing to grandparents’ investment in the care of the grandchildren as well as to older generations’ control of wealth and cultural knowledge, but the evolutionary dynamics of grandparent terms has yet to be studied in a phylogenetically explicit context. Here, we present the first phylogenetic comparative study of grandparent terms by investigating 134 languages in Pama–Nyungan, an Australian family of hunter–gatherer languages. We infer that proto-Pama–Nyungan had, with high certainty, four separate terms for grandparents. This state then shifted into either a two-term system that distinguishes the genders of the grandparents or a three-term system that merges the ‘parallel’ grandparents, which could then transition into a different three-term system that merges the ‘cross’ grandparents. We find no support for the co-evolution of these systems with either community marriage organisation or post-marital residence. We find some evidence for the correlation of grandparent and grandchild terms, but no support for the correlation of grandparent and cross-cousin terms, suggesting that grandparents and grandchildren potentially form a single lexical category but that the entire kinship system does not necessarily change synchronously.