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We present cross‐cultural data on the existence of a pervasive institutional and ideological complex of male supremacy in band and village sociocultural systems, and we identify warfare as the most important cause of this complex. We explain the perpetuation of warfare in band and village society and its interaction with selective female infanticide as a response to the need to regulate population growth in the absence of effective or less costly alternatives. Our hypothesis is supported by a demographic analysis of 561 local band and village populations from 112 societies.

Tefft and Reinhardt recently reported that peacemaking mechanisms and periods of stable peace are associated with internal warfare, while peacemaking mechanisms are absent and peace is unstable in societies with external warfare. We suggest an explanation for these findings based on the argument that in pre-state level societies internal and external war are entirely different types of conflict. Internal war (conflict between communities of the same society) is part of a system of population control in pre-state level societies which also involves female infanticide, polygyny, and patrilocal residence. Internal war is thus a regulatory type of warfare requiring several mechanisms to initiate and inhibit it. In contrast, external warfare among pre-state level societies occurs between societies which have recently migrated to their locales and adopted matrilocal residence. External war is thus an intense struggle for survival between two or more societies trying to occupy the same niche in an ecosystem that cannot support all of them. There can be no regulation of this type of warfare–only victory–and hence there can be no peacemaking mechanisms.

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 https://d-place.org) 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 ...