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Title: | Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters |
Authors: | Page, AE Ringen, EJ Koster, J Borgerhoff Mulder, M Kramer, K Shenk, MK Stieglitz, J Starkweather, K Ziker, JP Boyette, AH Colleran, H Moya, C Du, J Mattison, SM Greaves, R Sum, C-Y Liu, R Lew-Levy, S Kiabiya Ntamboudila, F Prall, S Towner, MC Blumenfield, T Migliano, AB Major-Smith, D Dyble, M Salali, GD Chaudhary, N Derkx, IE Ross, CT Scelza, BA Gurven, MD Winterhalder, BP Cortez, C Pacheco-Cobos, L Schacht, R Macfarlan, SJ Leonetti, D French, JC Alam, N Zohora, FT Kaplan, HS Hooper, PL Sear, R |
Keywords: | fertility;subsistence-based populations;cross-cultural analysis;anthropological demography;demographic transition |
Issue Date: | 12-Feb-2024 |
Publisher: | PNAS |
Citation: | Page, A.E. et al. (2024) 'Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121 (9), e2318181121, pp. 1 - 10. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2318181121. |
Abstract: | While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities—incorporating market integration—are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found considerable variation in fertility. This variation did not align with group-level subsistence typologies. Societies labeled as “farmers” did not have higher fertility than others, while “foragers” did not have lower fertility. However, at the individual level, we found strong evidence that fertility was positively associated with farming and moderate evidence of a negative relationship between foraging and fertility. Markers of market integration were strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Despite strong cross-cultural evidence, these relationships were not consistent in all populations, highlighting the importance of the socioecological context, which likely influences the diverse mechanisms driving the relationship between fertility and subsistence. |
Description: | Data, Materials, and Software Availability. Anonymized CSV file data have been deposited in OSF (https://osf.io/8d9n2/?view_only=9e07c25 e06414f7a8d041e80e8539e5c) (49). Supporting Information is available online at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2318181121/suppl_file/pnas.2318181121.sapp.pdf . |
URI: | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/28509 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2318181121 |
ISSN: | 0027-8424 |
Other Identifiers: | ORCiD: Abigail E. Page https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0973-1569 ORCiD: Rebecca Sear https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4315-0223 e2318181121 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Life Sciences Research Papers |
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FullText.pdf | Copyright © 2024 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). | 2.49 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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