In situations like those, you're more likely to have age-set warrior classes. There are advantages to a communal standing army, in the event that enemies show up when the men of your family are away.A radically different approach to cross-cultural research was pursued in the 1960s by Robert Textor of Stanford University, who collected data on some 400 different cultures from around the world and classified them according to nearly 500 different traits. Was a particular culture matrilocal or patrilocal? What sort of legal system did it have? How did its people make a living? Did they believe in an afterlife? When at play, did they prefer games of chance or of strategy? The result is his monumental book, A Cross-Cultural Summary, filled with table after table of what cultural differences are likely to be linked to ecological differences. Ember determined that certain ecosystems are sufficiently stable that family units remain intact throughout the year, farming their plot of land or hunting in the forest.
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In other, more unstable settings, family units are often split up. During dry seasons, for example, pre-industrial agriculturalists often have to divide their herds into smaller groups, with different family members scattered to distant pockets of grazing land. Not surprisingly, the first attempts were often anything but scientific, and were instead howlers of white male racism. Every study seemed to generate irrefutable scientific proof that northern European ecosystems produced superior cultures, more advanced moral, technological, and intellectual development, and better schnitzel.One of the pioneers of the new version of ecological anthropology was John Whiting of Harvard, who produced a 1964 paper entitled "Effects of Climate on Certain Cultural Practices".
Comparing data from non-Westernised societies, he noted that, for example, cultures in habitats that produce protein-poor diets have the longest restrictions on post-partum sex. Whiting figured that with protein-poor diets, infants were more dependent on extended nursing, which placed a premium on keeping births far apart.Other anthropologists produced ecological studies concerning cross-cultural patterns of violence, in papers such as "Statistical Evidence for an Ecological Explanation of Warfare" (1982), by Melvin Ember of Yale. And yet why should Scandinavians be thought of as taciturn, and Mediterraneans as anything but? All across the planet, where you live has something to do with the sort of culture you grow up with. Traditional tundra societies are more likely to have cultural patterns in common with each other than with tropical rainforest societies. High-altitude-plateau cultures are likely to differ in systematic ways from island fishing societies.Some of the correlations between types of ecosystems and types of cultures are fairly predictable - desert nomads are not going to have 27 different words for snow.
