About

The Database of Global Cultural Evolution links historical data on cultural practices to contemporary populations around the world.

The historical data come from the Ethnographic Atlas (EA), which were accessed through the database D-Place (Murdock et al., 1999; Kirby et al., 2016). EA describes cultural practices for 1,291 pre-industrial societies around the world. The Ethnographic Atlas contains coded variables on subsistence economy, social and political organization, marriage and kinship patterns, inheritance, etc.

Contemporary populations in our database are defined based on living languages of the world.

The match between historical data and contemporary populations is based on language. The EA data from D-Place includes information on languages of pre-industrial societies. Using this information, we link the pre-industrial data from the EA to all contemporary languages using language trees of Glottolog 4.0, a comprehensive catalogue that organizes the world's languages, language families and dialects via a genealogical classification (Hammarström et al., 2019). To define values of each variable in the EA for all languages spoken by contemporary populations, genealogical trees of the Glottolog are used to match every contemporary language to one of the 1,291 societies from the Ethnographic Atlas. For each variable, every contemporary language is matched to the linguistically closest pre-industrial society which contains an observation for that variable.

Then, geographic information about the global distribution of contemporary languages is used to map the geographic distribution of each variable. Geographic data for living languages come from Ethnologue, a comprehensive database of world languages (Eberhard et al., 2020). The shapefile is provided by World Language Mapping System (WLMS) Version 19 (2016).

Finally, the map and data produced for each historical variable (from the EA) are displayed for all 7,651 contemporary languages listed in the Ethnologue. The contemporary population of languages is generated using Gridded Population of the World (Center for International Earth Science Information Network, 2020).

How do I cite the database?

Research that uses the Database of Global Cultural Evolution should cite the following paper:

Sources

Murdock, G. P., R. Textor, H. Barry, III, D. R. White, J. P. Gray, and W. T. Divale. (1999). Ethnographic Atlas. World Cultures 10:24-136 (codebook)

Kirby, K.R., Gray, R. D., Greenhill, S. J., Jordan, F. M., Gomes-Ng, S., Bibiko, H-J, et al. (2016). D-PLACE: A Global Database of Cultural, Linguistic and Environmental Diversity. PLoS ONE, 11(7): e0158391. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0158391.

Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin. (2019). Glottolog 4.0. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. (Available online at https://glottolog.org)

Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). (2020). Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

The World Language Mapping System (WLMS) Version 19 [Computer software]. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.worldgeodatasets.com/language/

Center for International Earth Science Information Network - CIESIN - Columbia University, United Nations Food and Agriculture Programme - FAO, and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical - CIAT. (2020). Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3): Population Count Grid. Palisades, NY: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v4