The Evolution and Ecology of Land Ownership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Land ownership norms play a central role in social-ecological systems, and have been studied extensively as a component of ethnographies. Yet only recently has the distribution of land ownership norms across cultures been examined from evolutionary and ecological perspectives. Here we incorporate evolutionary and macroecological modelling to test associations between land ownership norms and environmental, subsistence, and cultural contact predictors for societies in the Bantu language family. We find that Bantu land ownership norms likely evolved on a unilinear trajectory, but not necessarily one requiring consistent increase in exclusivity as suggested by prior theory. Our macroecological analyses suggest that Bantu societies are more likely to have some form of ownership when their neighbors also do. We also find an effect of environmental productivity, supporting resource defensibility theory, which posits that land ownership is more likely where productivity is predictable. We find less support for a proposed link between agricultural intensification and land ownership. Overall, we demonstrate the value of combining analytical approaches from evolution and ecology to test diverse hypotheses on land ownership across a range of disciplines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".