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From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at ) brings together a dispersed corpus of information on the geography, language, culture, and environment of over 1400 human societies. We aim to enable researchers to investigate the extent to which patterns in cultural diversity are shaped by different forces, including shared history, demographics, migration/diffusion, cultural innovations, and environmental and ecological conditions. We detail how D-PLACE helps to overcome four common barriers to understanding these forces: i) location of relevant cultural data, (ii) linking data from distinct sources using diverse ethnonyms, (iii) variable time and place foci for data, and (iv) spatial and historical dependencies among cultural groups that present challenges for analysis. D-PLACE facilitates the visualisation of relationships among cultural groups and between people and their environments, with results downloadable as tables, on a map, or on a linguistic tree. We also describe how D-PLACE can be used for exploratory, predictive, and evolutionary analyses of cultural diversity by a range of users, from members of the worldwide public interested in contrasting their own cultural practices with those of other societies, to researchers using large-scale computational phylogenetic analyses to study cultural evolution. In summary, we hope that D-PLACE will enable new lines of investigation into the major drivers of cultural change and global patterns of cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Two fundamental questions about human language demand answers: why are so many languages spoken today and why is their geographical distribution so uneven? Although hypotheses have been proposed for centuries, the processes that determine patterns of linguistic and cultural diversity remain poorly understood. Previous studies, which relied on correlative, curve-fitting approaches, have produced contradictory results. Here we present the first application of process-based simulation modelling, derived from macroecology, to examine the distribution of human groups and their languages. Location The Australian continent is used as a case study to demonstrate the power of simulation modelling for identifying processes shaping the diversity and distribution of human languages. Methods Process-based simulation models allow investigators to hold certain factors constant in order to isolate and assess the impact of modelled processes. We tested the extent to which a minimal set of processes determines the number and spatial distribution of languages on the Australian continent. Our model made three basic assumptions based on previously proposed, but untested, hypotheses: groups fill unoccupied spaces, rainfall limits population density and groups divide after reaching a maximum population. Results Remarkably, this simple model accurately predicted the total number of languages (average estimate 406, observed 407), and explained 56% of spatial variation in language richness on the Australian continent. Main conclusions Our results present strong evidence that current climatic conditions and limits to group size are important processes shaping language diversity patterns in Australia. Our study also demonstrates how simulation models from macroecology can be used to understand the processes that have shaped human cultural diversity across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]