Youngblood Mason, Miton Helena, Morin Olivier
Minds and Traditions Group, Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany.
Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
Evol Hum Sci. 2023 Apr 13;5:e10. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2023.5. eCollection 2023.
Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity. The historical record of cattle brands in some US states is complete owing to legal registration, providing a unique opportunity to assess how sampling processes leading to time- and space-averaging influence our ability to make inferences from limited datasets in fields like archaeology. In this preregistered study, we used a dataset of ~81,000 Kansas cattle brands (1990-2016) to explore two aspects: (1) the relative influence of copying, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for complexity on the creation and diffusion of brand components; and (2) the effects of time- and space-averaging on statistical signals. By conducting generative inference with an agent-based model, we found that the patterns in our data are consistent with copying and pressure for intermediate complexity. In addition, by comparing mixed and structured datasets, we found that these statistical signals of copying are robust to, and possibly boosted by, time- and space-averaging.
牛的烙印（留在牲畜身上的所有权标记）受到影响其他图形代码的各种力量的作用：组成部分的复制、对独特性的压力以及对复杂性的压力。由于法律登记，美国一些州牛烙印的历史记录是完整的，这为评估导致时间和空间平均化的抽样过程如何影响我们从考古学等领域有限数据集中进行推断的能力提供了独特机会。在这项预先注册的研究中，我们使用了一个包含约81000个堪萨斯州牛烙印（1990 - 2016年）的数据集来探究两个方面：（1）复制、对独特性的压力以及对复杂性的压力对品牌组成部分的创建和传播的相对影响；（2）时间和空间平均化对统计信号的影响。通过基于代理模型进行生成性推断，我们发现数据中的模式与复制以及对中等复杂性的压力相一致。此外，通过比较混合数据集和结构化数据集，我们发现这些复制的统计信号对时间和空间平均化具有鲁棒性，并且可能会因时间和空间平均化而增强。
