Punishing Outsiders
Some 700 to 1,000 different languages, about 15 percent of the total on Earth, are spoken in Papua New Guinea. By comparison, only 90 languages are spoken in China.
"When resources are abundant, it is possible for a small group of humans to survive, while in areas where resources are not very abundant people have to range over large areas to meet their daily needs, and that seems to homogenize cultures, because they're constantly coming into contact with other people," Pagel said.
But how come humans don't form one large and homogenous cultural group in ecologically rich areas like Papua New Guinea?
Pagel says that's because humans display forms of social behavior that favor living in small groups, such as rewarding cooperation, punishing those who deviate from the norms, and being wary of outsiders.
"In trying to control resources and excluding others from using them, we have developed [sophisticated group behaviors such as] hunting … and warfare," he said. "These things require enormous amounts of cooperation, coherence, and communication among individuals."
It may also be a matter of choice. While our genes are transmitted vertically and can't be chosen, cultural traits can be accepted or rejected. However, most people still get their traits from their ancestors rather than other cultures.
"People tend to speak the same language as their parents, and have the same political and religious beliefs," Pagel said.
Potential Transition
Although our cultural diversity is still strong, it is perhaps only a fraction of what it was, say, 10,000 years ago, when agriculturists moved out of Mesopotamia and replaced hunter-gatherer cultures in Europe and elsewhere, wiping out languages in the process.
"There are only about 50 languages spoken in Europe today," Pagel said. "If it hadn't been for the advance of the agriculturists, we would probably have greater linguistic diversity in Europe, and probably greater cultural diversity too."
We may be in another state of transition now. While some experts suggest that mass migrations of people moving from poor regions to rich areas will dent our cultural diversity, Pagel is not so sure.
"Whether things will change in the next hundred years and we'll have one big homogenous world, we can't really say," he said. "But we can say that, despite the potential for movement, really very little has happened so far."
After all, Pagel says, you can walk down a street in Manhattan and find three generations of Italian speakers. Walk a few blocks more, and people are speaking Chinese. "The cultural differences in Manhattan still remain," he said.
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