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In his Atlas of World Cultures, George Murdock catalogues more than 1000 discreet populations of peoples that are too often amalgamated at the level of the nation-state. For each of these ethnically informed cultural populations, Murdock provides nearly fifty points of tabular ethnographic codes, including mating systems, kinship networks, levels of consanguinity, post-marriage living arrangements, type and intensity of agriculture, settlement patterns, and social fluidity, which are then combined with environmental statistics such as latitude, and primary and secondary climate classifications. This chapter asks and answers questions concerning Galton’s Problem, finding commonalities among contiguous cultures to extend, not simply from contiguity, but from shared selective pressures. Murdock’s cross-cultural classificatory variants therefore derive from ecologically driven evolution, as described in social biogeographical applications of life history theory.

Like Toynbee, William McNeill is a world historian, but one with a bent toward epidemiology. Most directly in his Plagues and Peoples, McNeill considers the role of disease-induced mortality, infection, and transmission alongside the more traditional historical topics of war and conquest. McNeill studied disease as a primary cause in its own right, rather than as incidental sequelae to climatological catastrophes, famine, war, or resource limitation. McNeill anticipates the emphasis placed by modern evolutionary life history theory upon regimes of extrinsic mortality as being the main drivers shaping life history evolution. After all, from its founding, life history has incorporated population density and mortality rates into its quantitative formulae and qualitative theory, making it an ideal framework from which to reconsider McNeill.

In the late Victorian era, one could find Ellsworth Huntington caravanning through Eurasia, counting tree rings in northern California, or subsisting on stipends on the fringes of Yale’s geology department. Writing on demography as much as geography, Huntington described non-random change through founding effects and migration, as much as natural and sexual selection. Importantly, he distinguished between physical and community ecology, applying these concepts to human biogeography. Though not available to Huntington who wrote most prolifically in the earliest part of the twentieth century, life history evolution is indispensable to understanding the dynamics of climatically induced evolution across populations treated, for instance, in The Principles of Human Geography and The Human Habitat. Through Huntington’s writings, cross-continental variation in life histories is introduced and explained.

James Casey researches regional variation in lineal descent, consanguinity, and patterns of inheritance as they alternately impede or impel state formation. Joined by a spirit of capitalism, a market economy, and the division of labor, lineal descent, consanguinity and patterns of inheritance each had a role to play as drivers of state formation, and markers of progress toward social complexity. To the degree that kinship bands persisted, they acted simultaneously as an impediment to autonomous household formation, and to formal state formation. As Casey contends, changes in family organization underlay changes in social organization. Building upon this insight, as this tenth chapter describes, precipitating ecological drivers and concomitant evolutionary consequences cannot be absented when explaining the historical transition from consanguineous tribe to genetically diversified state.

John Landers is a demographer of pre-industrial Europe, acutely aware of bioenergetic resources as they are spent and accrued in a careful calculus. As if on a balance sheet, output must match input. Within such an empirically informed historical framework, Landers provides one of the most detailed demographic studies of eighteenth-century London, combining mortality data with fertility, population structure, and migration. As does the life history researcher, Landers pursues a more complete bioenergetic balance sheet than does Price or Malthus, reflecting demography as a discipline plotting ever closer to studying these many variables as a yoked complex. Extending from Landers, this seventh chapter describes an emerging application of life history evolution known as social biogeography, with its cascade of consequences proliferating across five ecological levels.