R A Bentley
Biographic Data
| ID | 17754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R A Bentley |
| GIVEN NAMES | R A |
| FAMILY NAME | Bentley |
| SIGNATURE | BENTLEY R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tennessee at Knoxville |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9086-2197 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 79 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 967 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 79 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Exploring small differences in δ15N between sexes in early agricultural Europe
Recent large-scale syntheses of stable isotope data provide an opportunity to reassess published bulk bone collagen δ 15 N and δ 13 C values from thousands of individuals across hundreds of archaeological sites in Europe, spanning the Mesolithic to the modern era. Our analyses of this extraordinary dataset reveal that differences in mean isotope values between the sexes from the Neolithic through the Iron Age are small in comparison to difference…
Multi-disciplinary Approaches to Prehistoric Kinship Systems of Europe
There has been much discussion of various lines of evidence—genetic, bioarchaeological, and cultural–phylogenetic—that indicate patrilineal and patrilocal kinship systems predominated in Neolithic to Bronze Age Europe. These patterns were unique to this time and place, however, and evidence from prior periods and from other regions outside of Europe suggest a broader diversity in kinship systems that was replaced over time. Moreover, practices su…
An invisible threat? Exploring the physical and mental health risks of coal air pollution in the United States
Media usage and attitudes toward Russia versus the EU: Insights into the collective consciousness of Russian-speaking Belarusians and Ukrainians pre-Russia's invasion of Ukraine
Through the theoretical lens of political socialization, our study explores associations between types of media consumption and attitudes toward Russia versus the European Union (EU) amongst Russian-speaking populations in Belarus and Ukraine. We do so through examining responses from surveys and focus groups conducted in both countries a year prior to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Our findings showed that in the pro-Russia authoritarian cou…
The cultural macroevolution of arcade video games: Innovation, Collaboration, and Collapse
Arcade video games evolved in a constrained design space, following patterns of diversification, stabilisation, and collapse that mirror macroevolutionary processes. Despite their historical significance and detailed digital records, arcade games remain underexplored in cultural evolution research. Drawing on a dataset of 7,205 machines spanning four decades, we reconstruct the evolutionary trajectories of arcade niches using a multi-scale framew…
Perceived social influence on vaccination decisions: A Covid-19 case study
Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions
Cultural inheritance is a central issue in archaeology. If variation were not inherited, cultures could not evolve. Some archaeologists have dismissed cultural evolutionary theory in general, and the significance of inheritance specifically, substituting instead a view of culture change that results from agency and intentionality amid a range of options in terms of social identity, cultural values and behaviours. This emphasis projects the modern…
On cultural traditions and innovation: Finding Common Ground
We appreciate the respondents' comments on our debate article 'Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions' (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices-such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes-often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frie…
Punctuated equilibrium at 50: Anything there for evolutionary anthropology? Yes; definitely
The theory of punctuated equilibrium (PE) was developed a little over 50 years ago to explain long-term, large-scale appearance and disappearance of species in the fossil record. A theory designed specifically for that purpose cannot be expected, out of the box, to be directly applicable to biocultural evolution, but in revised form, PE offers a promising approach to incorporating not only a wealth of recent empirical research on genetic, linguis…
Generational effects of culture and digital media in former Soviet Republics
In public opinion, social and digital media provide means for influence as well as sorting according to pre-existing values. Here we consider types of media usage versus opinion using new polling results in the former Soviet republics (FSRs) of Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. Over 1000 individuals in each country were asked about a news event (the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol) and about the long-term future of their country. We find that yea…
Estimating two key dimensions of cultural transmission from archaeological data
Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective innovation
Diversity drives both biological and artificial evolution. A prevalent assumption in cultural evolution is that the generation of novel features is an inherent property of a subset of the population (e.g., experts). In contrast, diversity—the fraction of objects in the corpus that are unique—exhibits complex collective dynamics such as oscillations that cannot be simply reduced to individual attributes. Here, we explore how a popular cultural dom…
Monitoring event-driven dynamics on Twitter: A case study in Belarus
Analysts of social media differ in their emphasis on the effects of message content versus social network structure. The balance of these factors may change substantially across time. When a major event occurs, initial independent reactions may give way to more social diffusion of interpretations of the event among different communities, including those committed to disinformation. Here, we explore these dynamics through a case study analysis of …
Observations and conversations: How communities learn about infection risk can impact the success of non-pharmaceutical interventions against epidemics
We conclude that maintaining social focus on local outbreak status will allow individuals to structure their perceived social norms appropriately and respond more rapidly when risk increases. Finding ways to relay accurate local information from trusted community leaders could improve mitigation even where more intrusive/costly strategies, such as contact-tracing, are not possible
Prehistory of Kinship
As observed in recent centuries, the contemporary variety of kinship systems reflects millennia of human migration, cultural inheritance, adaptation, and diversification. This review describes key developments in prehistoric kinship, from matricentric hominin evolution to the Neolithic transition to agriculture and the heterogeneous resilience of matriliny. Starting with our hominin ancestors, kinship evolved among a cooperative breeding species …
Cultural values predict national Covid-19 death rates
National responses to a pandemic require populations to comply through personal behaviors that occur in a cultural context. Here we show that aggregated cultural values of nations, derived from World Values Survey data, have been at least as important as top-down government actions in predicting the impact of COVID-19. At the population level, the cultural factor of cosmopolitanism, together with obesity, predict higher numbers of deaths in the f…
Genes, culture, and the human niche: An overview
The sharp distinction between biological traits and culturally based traits, which had long been standard in evolutionary approaches to behavior, was blurred in the early 1980s by mathematical models that allowed a co‐dependent evolution of genetic transmission and cultural information. Niche‐construction theory has since added another contrast to standard evolutionary theory, in that it views niche construction as a cause of evolutionary change …
Early warning of vulnerable counties in a pandemic using socio-economic variables
In the U.S. in early 2020, heterogenous and incomplete county-scale data on COVID-19 hindered effective interventions in the pandemic. While numbers of deaths can be used to estimate actual number of infections after a time lag, counties with low death counts early on have considerable uncertainty about true numbers of cases in the future. Here we show that supplementing county-scale mortality statistics with socioeconomic data helps estimate tru…
Kinship and migration in prehistoric mainland Southeast Asia: An overview of isotopic evidence
Neutral models are a tool, not a syndrome
Learning Strategies and Population Dynamics During the Pleistocene Colonization of North America
The Importance of Small Decisions
How people make decisions in an era of too much information and fake news. Humans originally evolved in a world of few choices. Prehistoric, preindustrial, and predigital eras required fewer decisions than today's all-access, always-on world of too much information. Economists have largely discarded the idea that agents act rationally and the market follows suit. It seems that no matter how small or innocuous a decision might seem, there's almost…
U.S. obesity as delayed effect of excess sugar
In the last century, U.S. diets were transformed, including the addition of sugars to industrially-processed foods. While excess sugar has often been implicated in the dramatic increase in U.S. adult obesity over the past 30 years, an unexplained question is why the increase in obesity took place many years after the increases in U.S. sugar consumption. To address this, here we explain adult obesity increase as the cumulative effect of increased …
Internet Research Agency Twitter activity predicted 2016 U.S. election polls
In 2016, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) deployed thousands of Twitter bots that released hundreds of thousands of English language tweets. It has been hypothesized this affected public opinion during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Here we test that hypothesis using vector autoregression (VAR) comparing time series of election opinion polling during 2016 versus numbers of re-tweets or ‘likes’ of IRA tweets. We find that changes in opinio…
The cultural foundations of modern democracies
The Characterization of Biologically Available Strontium Isotope Ratios for the Study of Prehistoric Migration
Strontium isotope analysis of bone and tooth enamel from prehistoric human skeletons is an important new technique used to address questions regarding migration. Two problems arise in such investigations: (1) levels of strontium isotope ratios in local bedrock, soil, water, plants and animals are variable; and (2) a range of values in human bone and enamel data make it difficult to distinguish some migrants from locals. Analysis of the bones of s…
Determining the ‘local’ 87Sr/86Sr range for archaeological skeletons: A case study from Neolithic Europe
Prehistoric Migration in Europe: Strontium Isotope Analysis of Early Neolithic Skeletons
Prehistoric human migration in the Linearbandkeramik of Central Europe
This paper presents a revised chronology for the Linearbandkeramik and strontium isotope measurements of human skeletal material from two cemeteries which indicate a high incidence of migration. It appears that LBK farmers were highly migratory and interacted with surrounding communities
Shifting Gender Relations at Khok Phanom Di, Thailand: Isotopic Evidence from the Skeletons
The values for isotopes of strontium, carbon, and oxygen in human tooth enamel from the prehistoric site of Khok Phanom Di (ca. 2100-1500 BC) in Thailand shed light on human mobility and marital residence during a crucial period of subsistence change. Khok Phanom Di was a sedentary coastal community that apparently relied on hunting, gathering, and fishing in the midst of a transition to rice agriculture in the interior. The results of the isotop…
Geographical Patterns in Biologically Available Strontium, Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Signatures in Prehistoric Sw Germany
In order to interpret strontium and oxygen isotope values in Neolithic human skeletons analysed previously, we begin to map the biologically available strontium, carbon and oxygen isotopic signatures of prehistoric southern Germany by analysing tooth enamel of pigs from archaeological sites distributed around the region. The mapping shows a marked upland–lowland difference in biologically available 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values, ranging between 0.7086 and …
Human Mobility at the Early Neolithic Settlement of Vaihingen, Germany: Evidence From Strontium Isotope Analysis
As evidence concerning human mobility during the transition to agriculture in central Europe, we present the results of strontium isotope analysis of human skeletons from the Neolithic village of Vaihingen, Germany. We find significantly more ‘non‐local’ 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values from humans buried in a Neolithic ditch surrounding Vaihingen than from those buried within the settlement. These results fit with previous studies showing a correlation betwe…
Moving peoples, changing diets: Isotopic differences highlight migration and subsistence changes in the Upper Mun River Valley, Thailand
Lapita Migrants in the Pacific's Oldest Cemetery: Isotopic Analysis at Teouma, Vanuatu
Teouma, an archaeological site on Efate Island, Vanuatu, features the earliest cemetery yet discovered of the colonizers of Remote Oceania, from the late second millennium B.C. In order to investigate potential migration of seventeen human individuals, we measured isotopes of strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (δ18O), and carbon (δ13C), as well as barium (Ba) and strontium (Sr) concentrations, in tooth enamel from skeletons excavated in the first two …
Isotopic evidence for mobility and group organization among Neolithic farmers at Talheim, Germany, 5000 BC
The mass grave found near Talheim in southern Germany dates to approximately 7000 years ago and contains the skeletal remains of 34 individuals from the Early Neolithic period, associated with what is known as the Linearbandkeramik culture. These individuals appear to have been the victims of a massacre, based on the presence of numerous lethal head wounds, several arrow wounds, and the placement of all of these individuals in the same burial pit…
Community Diversity at Ban Lum Khao, Thailand: Isotopic Evidence from the Skeletons
Isotopes of strontium, carbon, and oxygen were analyzed in human tooth enamel from the Bronze Age site of Ban Lum Khao (c. 1400 B.C. -500 B.C. ) in Thailand. The strontium and oxygen isotopes, which generally reflect place of origin, delimit discrete groups among the individuals. Among the females, different groups determined through isotopic signatures were buried with distinctive pottery types. This suggests that social identity, drawn from vil…
Intrinsic or extrinsic population growth in Iron Age northeast Thailand? The evidence from isotopic analysis
Matrilocality during the prehistoric transition to agriculture in Thailand
Stable isotopes in teeth are providing important correlations between ancient people and the geographical location of their childhood homes. In an exciting new application, the authors measured the varying signatures of strontium, oxygen and carbon isotopes in the teeth of a sequence of people buried in Thailand during the period of the introduction and intensification of agriculture. Preliminary results point to the arrival of immigrant men, fol…
The Neolithic transition in Europe: Comparing Broad Scale Genetic and Local Scale Isotopic Evidence
Genetic studies of modern populations are raising many interesting questions about how far the modern gene pool is owed to incoming populations during the agricultural revolution in Neolithic Europe. But, as the authors show, studies of isotopic data from cemeteries reveal a picture of increasing subtlety at local level. While early farmers may have been initially newcomers in the upper Rhine they may also have soon intermarried with contemporary…
Isotopic signatures and hereditary traits: Snapshot of a Neolithic community in Germany
A group of Linearbandkeramik people at Talheim, Germany were previously found to have died at the same time, probably in a massacre, and the authors were able to ask some searching questions of their skeletons. The isotope signatures of strontium, oxygen and carbon, which gave information on diet and childhood region, showed up three groups which correlated with hereditary traits (derived previously from the analysis of the teeth). In the local g…
Kinship, Marriage, and the Genetics of Past Human Dispersals
The extent to which colonizing farmer populations have overwhelmed or "replaced" indigenous forager populations, as opposed to having intermarried with them, has been widely debated. Indigenous-colonist "admixture" is often represented in genetic models as a single parameter that, although parsimonious and simple, is incongruous with the sex-specific nature of mtDNA and Y-chromosome data. To help interpret genetic patterns, we can construct usefu…
Cultural Transmission and Stochastic Network Growth
Archaeological theory has traditionally presupposed the existence of 'battleship curves' in stylistic evolution, with little understanding about what governs the width (variant frequency) or length (variant lifespan) of these curves. In terms of these variables, we propose that there is a testable difference between independent decisions, unbiased transmission, and biased transmission in cultural evolution. We expect independent decision making t…
Stimulated Variation and Cascades: Two Processes in the Evolution of Complex Technological Systems
Design Space and Cultural Transmission: Case Studies from Paleoindian Eastern North America
Specialisation and wealth inequality in a model of a clustered economic network
Prehistory of Kinship
As observed in recent centuries, the contemporary variety of kinship systems reflects millennia of human migration, cultural inheritance, adaptation, and diversification. This review describes key developments in prehistoric kinship, from matricentric hominin evolution to the Neolithic transition to agriculture and the heterogeneous resilience of matriliny. Starting with our hominin ancestors, kinship evolved among a cooperative breeding species …
A first absolute chronology for Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age Myanmar: New AMS14C dates from Nyaung'gan and Oakaie
The selectivity of social learning and the tempo of cultural evolution
Many modern studies of cultural innovation and demographic change rest on the proposition that social learning is a key process in the spread of novel variants. We agree with this proposition, but we also suggest that the selectivity of social learning, with respect to a skill or knowledge, has largely been overlooked in considering how the tempo of cultural evolution depends on population size. We evaluate contrasting predictions ranging from ca…
Complexity in history: Modelling the organisational demography of the British banking sector
Using a new historical data set on the ‘population’ of British Banks for the last 200 years, we consider why, since its peak of approximately 1100 banks 1810, the population of British banks has declined to its present day population of less that 100. We hypothesise that amalgamation became an advantageous way for banks to expand, and use an agent-based simulation to test this hypothesis against the baking data. We are unable to falsify the hypot…
The role of food storage in human niche construction: An example from Neolithic Europe
Niche construction theory, a branch of evolutionary biology, places emphasis on the capacity of organisms, through their metabolism, activities and choices, to modify natural selection in their environment and thereby act as co-directors of their own evolution as well as that of others. Humans are potent niche constructors, and understanding how niche construction regulates ecosystem dynamics is central to understanding the impact of human popula…
Provenience analysis of pottery from Fijian hillforts: Preliminary Implications for Exchange Within the Archipelago
Surface finds of pottery from hillforts in the Yasawas Islands were examined by neutron activation analysis (NAA) and by petrographic analysis. The NAA results show that pottery from the Yasawas falls into at least three distinct compositional groups. Petrographic comparison and a pilot study by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP‐MS) shows pottery from the lower Singatoka valley to have a composition similar to a group of Yasawas p…
Stylistic Change as a Self-Organized Critical Phenomenon: An Archaeological Study in Complexity
Prehistoric human migration in the Linearbandkeramik of Central Europe
This paper presents a revised chronology for the Linearbandkeramik and strontium isotope measurements of human skeletal material from two cemeteries which indicate a high incidence of migration. It appears that LBK farmers were highly migratory and interacted with surrounding communities
The Characterization of Biologically Available Strontium Isotope Ratios for the Study of Prehistoric Migration
Strontium isotope analysis of bone and tooth enamel from prehistoric human skeletons is an important new technique used to address questions regarding migration. Two problems arise in such investigations: (1) levels of strontium isotope ratios in local bedrock, soil, water, plants and animals are variable; and (2) a range of values in human bone and enamel data make it difficult to distinguish some migrants from locals. Analysis of the bones of s…
Prehistoric Migration in Europe: Strontium Isotope Analysis of Early Neolithic Skeletons
Determining the ‘local’ 87Sr/86Sr range for archaeological skeletons: A case study from Neolithic Europe
Human Mobility at the Early Neolithic Settlement of Vaihingen, Germany: Evidence From Strontium Isotope Analysis
As evidence concerning human mobility during the transition to agriculture in central Europe, we present the results of strontium isotope analysis of human skeletons from the Neolithic village of Vaihingen, Germany. We find significantly more ‘non‐local’ 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values from humans buried in a Neolithic ditch surrounding Vaihingen than from those buried within the settlement. These results fit with previous studies showing a correlation betwe…
The Neolithic transition in Europe: Comparing Broad Scale Genetic and Local Scale Isotopic Evidence
Genetic studies of modern populations are raising many interesting questions about how far the modern gene pool is owed to incoming populations during the agricultural revolution in Neolithic Europe. But, as the authors show, studies of isotopic data from cemeteries reveal a picture of increasing subtlety at local level. While early farmers may have been initially newcomers in the upper Rhine they may also have soon intermarried with contemporary…
Cultural Transmission and Stochastic Network Growth
Archaeological theory has traditionally presupposed the existence of 'battleship curves' in stylistic evolution, with little understanding about what governs the width (variant frequency) or length (variant lifespan) of these curves. In terms of these variables, we propose that there is a testable difference between independent decisions, unbiased transmission, and biased transmission in cultural evolution. We expect independent decision making t…
Human mobility and the prehistoric spread of farming: Isotope evidence from human skeletons
Specialisation and wealth inequality in a model of a clustered economic network
Geographical Patterns in Biologically Available Strontium, Carbon and Oxygen Isotope Signatures in Prehistoric Sw Germany
In order to interpret strontium and oxygen isotope values in Neolithic human skeletons analysed previously, we begin to map the biologically available strontium, carbon and oxygen isotopic signatures of prehistoric southern Germany by analysing tooth enamel of pigs from archaeological sites distributed around the region. The mapping shows a marked upland–lowland difference in biologically available 87 Sr/ 86 Sr values, ranging between 0.7086 and …
Matrilocality during the prehistoric transition to agriculture in Thailand
Stable isotopes in teeth are providing important correlations between ancient people and the geographical location of their childhood homes. In an exciting new application, the authors measured the varying signatures of strontium, oxygen and carbon isotopes in the teeth of a sequence of people buried in Thailand during the period of the introduction and intensification of agriculture. Preliminary results point to the arrival of immigrant men, fol…
Mobility and kinship in the prehistoric Sahara: Strontium isotope analysis of Holocene human skeletons from the Acacus Mts. (southwestern Libya)
Strontium Isotopes from the Earth to the Archaeological Skeleton: A Review
Isotopic evidence for mobility and group organization among Neolithic farmers at Talheim, Germany, 5000 BC
The mass grave found near Talheim in southern Germany dates to approximately 7000 years ago and contains the skeletal remains of 34 individuals from the Early Neolithic period, associated with what is known as the Linearbandkeramik culture. These individuals appear to have been the victims of a massacre, based on the presence of numerous lethal head wounds, several arrow wounds, and the placement of all of these individuals in the same burial pit…
Academic copying, archaeology and the English language
The author detects a new undisciplined movement in academic writing. (though we still apply all the strictures here.Ed
Kinship and mobility during the prehistoric spread of farming: Isotope Evidence From the Skeletons
Regular rates of popular culture change reflect random copying
Single Reviews
Book reviewed in this article: The Bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia . Marc Oxenham and Nancy Tayles, eds
Fashion versus reason - then and now
Analogies between modern practice and prehistoric material culture are becoming increasingly useful for archaeologists, including those interested in branding studies, for example (e.g. Wengrow, in press) and at formal research centres such as the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity and the Santa Fe Institute. Studies of modern cultural change - at a level of detail that most archaeologists can only dream about - can lead to relat…
Lapita Migrants in the Pacific's Oldest Cemetery: Isotopic Analysis at Teouma, Vanuatu
Teouma, an archaeological site on Efate Island, Vanuatu, features the earliest cemetery yet discovered of the colonizers of Remote Oceania, from the late second millennium B.C. In order to investigate potential migration of seventeen human individuals, we measured isotopes of strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (δ18O), and carbon (δ13C), as well as barium (Ba) and strontium (Sr) concentrations, in tooth enamel from skeletons excavated in the first two …
Shifting Gender Relations at Khok Phanom Di, Thailand: Isotopic Evidence from the Skeletons
The values for isotopes of strontium, carbon, and oxygen in human tooth enamel from the prehistoric site of Khok Phanom Di (ca. 2100-1500 BC) in Thailand shed light on human mobility and marital residence during a crucial period of subsistence change. Khok Phanom Di was a sedentary coastal community that apparently relied on hunting, gathering, and fishing in the midst of a transition to rice agriculture in the interior. The results of the isotop…
Isotopic signatures and hereditary traits: Snapshot of a Neolithic community in Germany
A group of Linearbandkeramik people at Talheim, Germany were previously found to have died at the same time, probably in a massacre, and the authors were able to ask some searching questions of their skeletons. The isotope signatures of strontium, oxygen and carbon, which gave information on diet and childhood region, showed up three groups which correlated with hereditary traits (derived previously from the analysis of the teeth). In the local g…
Tradition and Fashion in Consumer Choice: Bagging the Scottish Munros
Evidence is growing that in many markets consumers select not simply on the basis of the perceived attributes of products, but their preferences are modified by the behaviour of others. Economists have paid relatively little attention to such markets. We consider evidence from the activity of hill‐walking. The Munros are a list of Scottish hills over 3000 feet in height. We analyse completions of both the Munros themselves, and the Munro Tops, a …
Geography (44 works) · Archaeology (41 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (40 works) · Sociology (32 works) · History (27 works) · Biology (26 works) · Prehistory (26 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (20 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (19 works)