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.

Reference

Abigail Page, Erik Ringen, Jeremy Koster, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Karen Kramer, Mary K. Shenk, Jonathan Stieglitz, Kathrine Starkweather, John P. Ziker, Adam H. Boyette, Heidi Colleran, Cristina Moya, Juan Du, Siobhan Mattison, Russell Greaves, Chun-Yi Sum, Ruizhe Liu, Sheina Lew-Levy, Francy Kiabiya Ntamboudila, Sean Prall, Mary C. Towner, Tami Blumenfield, Andrea Bamberg Migliano, Daniel Major-Smith, Mark Dyble, Gul Deniz Salali, Nikhil Chaudhary, Inez E. Derkx, Cody Ross, Brooke Scelza, Michael Gurven, Bruce P. Winterhalder, Carmen Cortez, Luis Pacheco-Cobos, Ryan Schacht, Shane Macfarlan, Donna Leonetti, Eric French, Nurul Alam, Fatema Tuz Zohora, Hillard Kaplan, Paul L. Hooper, and Rebecca Sear, “Women’s subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters”, PNAS, vol. 121, n. 9, February 2024.

Published in

PNAS, vol. 121, n. 9, February 2024