**Abstract:**

Paleobiologists use phylogenetics to study the patterns and processes of organismal evolution. Phylogenetic methods have also been deployed for reconstructing ancestor-descendant relationships using cultural data. Within evolutionary archaeology specifically, phylogenetic analyses based on maximum parsimony and discrete traits dominate, which sets limitations for the downstream role cultural phylogenies, once derived, can play in more elaborate analytical pipelines. Moreover, the use of discrete character traits in these efforts prevails, which in turn sets a number of non-trivial challenges. Recent methodological advances in Bayesian phylogenetics, however, now allow us to infer evolutionary dynamics using continuous characters. Capitalizing on these developments, we here present an exploratory analysis of cultural macroevolution of projectile point shape evolution in the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic (~15,000-11,000 BP) using a Bayesian phylodynamic approach and the fossilised birth-death process model. This model-based approach leaps far beyond the application of parsimony, in that it not only produces a tree, but also divergence times, and diversification rates, while incorporating uncertainties. This allows us to compare rates to the pronounced climatic changes that occurred during our timeframe. While common in cultural evolutionary analyses of language, the extension of Bayesian phylodynamic models to archaeology represents a major methodological breakthrough.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @david_matzig

RECORDING - A macroevolutionary analysis of European late upper palaeolithic stone tool shape using a Bayesian phylodynamic framework

**Abstract:**

Ontogenetic niche construction has been suggested as a powerful driver influencing learning capabilities and survival across a wide range of species, including humans. A key component of the human ontogenetic niche is play objects. They are ubiquitous ethnographically and display remarkable similarities cross-culturally; they also appear archaeologically in periods often characterized by increased overall rates of innovation. This study explores the role of object play as a cultural variation-generating mechanism that fuels adaption during periods of climatic stress. In a natural experimental paradigm, children’s material culture in the Inuit and Norse societies that inhabited Greenland during the so-called Little Ice Age (~1350-1800 CE) have been compared, demonstrating marked differences in corpus volume, diversity, and change across time. Notably, the Norse settlers disappeared at this time, while Inuit communities thrived. Previous hypotheses for the demise of the Norse in Greenland have been proposed, often deterministically stressing climate or land degradation. As both societies experienced largely identical climatic stress, this case study affords the opportunity to explore what cultural factors – including ontogenetic niche construction and object play – may additionally have promoted survival or collapse. 

**Speaker's social media:**

@MathildeVester5

RECORDING - A natural experiment of history: Ontogenetic niche construction, explorative object play, and adaptation during the Little Ice Age in Greenland

**Abstract:**

Previous cross-cultural research suggests that climate hazards may have profound effects on a society’s culture.  For example, in non-state societies serious food-destroying hazards (typically droughts, some floods, and pest infestations) strongly predict higher warfare frequencies and more customary beyond-household sharing.  The research question addressed here is whether non-food-destroying hazards (such as storms and seismic activity) have similar or different effects on a range of cultural traits hypothesized to be adaptive responses in a worldwide sample of nonindustrial societies. For the past two years our research team has coded the type and frequency of hazards for 132 societies in the ethnographic record using eHRAF World Cultures. Preliminary results suggest that the contrast between frequent food-destroying and frequent non-food-destroying hazard profiles generally make very different predictions. For example, societies with more non-food-destroying hazards tend to have tighter cultures (stronger norms and severe punishment for norm violations), but cultural tightness is not predicted by food-destroying hazards. Food-destroying hazards in non-state societies predict more warfare, but non-food-destroying hazards predict less warfare. We present theory and causal models suggesting explanations for these divergent findings. Understanding how humans have adapted to hazards in the recent past may help us better understand the hazards faced today. 

**Speaker's social media:**



LIVE - Food-destroying versus Non-food-destroying hazards: A worldwide comparison of differential effects on culture

**Abstract:**

Intersections with the global capitalist market system offer challenges and opportunities for Indigenous people living in more or less economically autonomous communities. In contexts of increasing intersection, individuals engage with new globalized culture and economic practices in diverse ways depending on their positions within local social and economic systems. While there is a substantial literature on the emergence of inequality in such settings, there is a gap in research on the pathways through which people initially start shifting towards a cash-dependent subsistence strategy. Guided by cultural evolutionary theory, and drawing on data from 200 semi-structured interviews from one village in the Republic of the Congo, we use a Bayesian probability modeling approach to examine: 1) the role of individual differences as predictors of market intersection, here focused on gender, age, and migration status; and 2) the cultural transmission modes associated with individual’s economic strategies. Our analyses are on-going, but these data have implications for understanding how life histories interact with strategic social learning to motivate behavioral change at the individual level; and how cultural evolutionary forces may scale these up to higher level changes associated with globalization, including increased socio-economic inequality and ecosystem disruption (e.g., via employment for extractive industries).

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @utcp7b2e

RECORDING - Cultural transmission, individual differences, and globalization in a Congo Basin village

**Abstract:**

Context

Polarisation is a growing concern for social cohesion, with individuals aligning with their group's entrenched beliefs. Understanding its causes is key for cultural evolution theory, since cultural group formation is both central and elusive. Previous models typically generate only weak polarisation or rely on strong assumptions.

Purpose

This study examines how trust-based influence in cultural evolution fosters cultural polarisation and group identity formation.

Methods

We developed a mathematical model building on a cultural systems framework where agents trust and learn from those with compatible beliefs (sender filtering). We contrast this with a model where agents focus on the belief itself rather than the sender (belief filtering).

Key results

Sender filtering produces belief clusters, where initially unrelated beliefs (e.g. in climate change and vaccine effectiveness) can become strongly correlated, with the largest factions polarised at the extremes, adopting completely contrary beliefs. These belief clusters signal identity, where adherence to one belief predicts adopting others in the same cluster. In contrast, belief filtering polarises only when beliefs are inherently linked.

Implications

The findings shed new light on polarisation and the emergence of cultural groups. Algorithms like collaborative filtering work similar to our model, suggesting that digital technologies may exacerbate polarisation.

**Speaker's social media:**

@fredrikjansson.bsky.social

LIVE - Trust-based cultural transmission can form polarising group identities

Estimating the causal effects of a spatially-varying intervention on a spatially-varying outcome may be subject to non-local confounding (NLC), a phenomenon that can bias estimates when the treatments and outcomes of a given unit are dictated in part by the covariates of other nearby units. In particular, NLC is a challenge for evaluating the effects of environmental policies and climate events on health-related outcomes such as air pollution exposure. This paper first formalizes NLC using the potential outcomes framework, providing a comparison with the related phenomenon of causal interference. Then, it proposes a broadly applicable framework, termed weather2vec, that uses the theory of balancing scores to learn representations of non-local information into a scalar or vector defined for each observational unit, which is subsequently used to adjust for confounding in conjunction with causal inference methods. The framework is evaluated in a simulation study and two case studies on air pollution where the weather is an (inherently regional) known confounder.

Weather2vec: Representation Learning for Causal Inference with Non-Local Confounding in Air Pollution and Climate Studies

ImageNet-1k is a dataset often used for benchmarking machine learning (ML) models and evaluating tasks such as image recognition and object detection. Wild animals make up 27% of ImageNet-1k but, unlike classes representing people and objects, these data have not been closely scrutinized. In the current paper, we analyze the 13,450 images from 269 classes that represent wild animals in the ImageNet-1k validation set, with the participation of expert ecologists. We find that many of the classes are ill-defined or overlapping, and that 12% of the images are incorrectly labeled, with some classes having >90% of images incorrect. We also find that both the wildlife-related labels and images included in ImageNet-1k present significant geographical and cultural biases, as well as ambiguities such as artificial animals, multiple species in the same image, or the presence of humans. Our findings highlight serious issues with the extensive use of this dataset for evaluating ML systems, the use of such algorithms in wildlife-related tasks, and more broadly the ways in which ML datasets are commonly created and curated.

Bugs in the Data: How ImageNet Misrepresents Biodiversity

The topic of Climate Change (CC) has received limited attention in NLP despite its real-world urgency. Activists and policy-makers need NLP tools in order to effectively process the vast and rapidly growing textual data produced on CC. Their utility, however, primarily depends on whether state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the CC domain. In order to address this gap, we introduce the Climate Change Benchmark (ClimaBench), a benchmark collection of existing disparate datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of CC NLU tasks systematically. Further, we enhance the benchmark by releasing two large-scale labelled text classification and question-answering datasets curated from publicly available environmental disclosures. Lastly, we provide an analysis of several generic and CC-oriented models answering whether fine-tuning on domain text offers any improvements across these tasks. We hope this work provides a standard assessment tool for research on CC text data.

ClimaBench: A Benchmark Dataset For Climate Change Text Understanding in English

Ocean acidification and warming caused by increased anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions poses a tremendous challenge to marine calcifiers such as intertidal bivalves. The approach to studying acclimation potential or adaptation to climate change are often conducted under artificial conditions where food is provided ad libitum and do not consider tidal emersion. These limitations present problems for extrapolating results to natural ecosystems. For instance, food provisioning and regular emersion can enhance or limit acclimation capacities of marine organisms. Here we investigate the physiological response of young Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas exposed for 3 months to ambient and future (+3°C, -0.3 pH unit) climate scenarios under two food regimes (ad libitum vs restricted) and two tidal levels (subtidal vs intertidal, emersion twice daily) under laboratory conditions. Oysters were sampled for biometric and physiological rate measurements (respiration and food intake), biochemistry (energetic reserves and enzyme assay) and histology to evaluate their reproductive status. At the end of the experiment, oysters were further challenged with a viral disease to investigate the physiological cost of acclimation to these conditions and their immune response. Preliminary analyses suggest that food level was the most influential factor, followed by climate scenario and tidal level. We indeed found that growth, food intake, reproduction and disease resistance of oysters were negatively affected by food restriction. Future conditions enhanced oyster physiological rates and sexual maturation, particularly at high food levels. Finally, tidal level had no major effect on these variables, suggesting physiological compensatory mechanisms during emersion. Our study suggests that the oyster is robust to future climatic conditions, even when feeding was restricted. A detailed analysis of the results will be presented at the conference.

Physiological and immune response of oysters to climate change as a function of diet and tidal regime

The genus Primula L. (Primulaceae) represents approximately 430 species, distributed all over the Northern Hemisphere in temperate to alpine regions. It is an important floristic element of the Himalayan flora and is considered an ecological indicator of the high-altitude vegetation. Many Primula species show two morphs (pin and thrum) based on style length. The stigma of pin plants is positioned at the entrance of the flower, exhibiting a long style, while in thrum flowers, the style is much shorter, leaving the stigma around halfway up the floral tube. Among these species, Primula denticulata exhibits a large extent of occurrence in a broad altitudinal range (2096-3700 m). A study was undertaken to understand the frequency, morphological and phenological variations between two morphs of the species along an altitudinal gradient in the Western Himalayas. We recorded the numbers of pin and thrum flower morphs at three different elevations (2337m, 3000m, and 3700m) during 2021 and 2022. Our results indicate variation in morph frequency at middle elevation i.e., 3000m, while at lower and higher elevations, both the morphs have an equal frequency. A delay was observed in the onset of phenological events with increasing elevation. We observed more numbers of floral visitors at lower and middle elevations than at higher elevations. The stigmatic surface of pin and thrum morphs were found to be different under Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Along with these morphological and phenological observations, genetic diversity analysis of P. denticulata is underway with 290 samples collected from different populations along the altitudinal gradient and 100 primer pairs designed from Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs). As a result of this study, the correlation of morphological and phenological studies with genetic variation existing along the altitudinal gradient can be observed. The study will show the impact of changing environmental conditions on the diversity of the plant along the altitudinal gradient.
Keywords: Primula denticulata, Morph frequency, Altitudinal gradient, Morphological variations, Phenological variations, Changing environmental conditions








Effect of morphological, phenological variations and morph frequencies on population genetic diversity along an altitudinal gradient in heterostylous Primula denticulata

Sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) invaded the Laurentian Great Lakes in the early 20th century and remain a threat to fisheries in the largest freshwater ecosystem of the world. Nowadays, population growth is restrained by a highly successful control program that mainly relies on the application of the lampricide 3-trifluoromethyl-4’-nitrophenol (TFM) to streams infested with larval sea lamprey. Recent work shows that the effectiveness of TFM is affected by temperature, with the toxicity to larval sea lamprey decreasing with increasing temperature. As such, we set out to unveil the thermal breadth of larval sea lamprey using intermittent-flow respirometry. To do so, we calculated thermal performance curves for this life stage using two approaches: First, we acclimated larvae to 7, 13, 18, 21, 25 and 28°C and tested their aerobic scope at the respective acclimation temperature. Second, we acclimated larvae to 6, 13 and 21°C and subsequently performed acute exposure tests (6, 10, 13, 15, 18, 21, 25, 28 and 31°C), with a temperature increase/decrease rate of approx. 0.1°C/min. Our results show a wide thermal tolerance, consistent with the plasticity required to become a successful invasive species. Further, sea lamprey larvae show a thermal optimum nearing 28°C, indicating that their tolerance to TFM will likely continue to increase as water temperatures in the Great Lakes continue to rise due to climate change.

Effects of temperature acclimation on thermal performance for sea lamprey larvae

Rising temperatures pose a significant threat to the survival of ectothermic animals. Thermal physiological traits, including upper thermal limits, are proven useful traits to assess the vulnerability of ectotherms to changing temperatures. For instance, one may use upper thermal limits to estimate current and future thermal safety margins (i.e., the proximity of upper thermal limits to experienced temperatures), use this trait in coercion with other physiological traits in species distribution models, or investigate the plasticity, heritability and evolvability of these traits for buffering the impacts of changing temperatures. While datasets on thermal tolerance limits have been previously compiled, they often report single estimates for a given species, do not present measures of data dispersion, and are biased towards certain parts of the globe. In this project, we systematically searched the literature in seven languages and produced a dataset of over 3000 heat tolerance estimates for 616 amphibian species. I will first present how the dataset we compiled can be used to address various questions in ecophysiology, and its limitations. Indeed, despite its scope, this dataset also suffered from geographical biases and captured less than 10% of described amphibian species. Here, I will demonstrate how we can fill the missing parts of this puzzle using powerful imputation procedures and estimate the heat tolerance of most described amphibian species. I will then demonstrate how we used this comprehensive database to estimate the vulnerability of the worlds’ amphibians to current and projected temperatures. 

Underline digital video library

RECORDING - A macroevolutionary analysis of European late upper palaeolithic stone tool shape using a Bayesian phylodynamic framework

RECORDING - A natural experiment of history: Ontogenetic niche construction, explorative object play, and adaptation during the Little Ice Age in Greenland

LIVE - Food-destroying versus Non-food-destroying hazards: A worldwide comparison of differential effects on culture

RECORDING - Cultural transmission, individual differences, and globalization in a Congo Basin village

LIVE - Trust-based cultural transmission can form polarising group identities

Weather2vec: Representation Learning for Causal Inference with Non-Local Confounding in Air Pollution and Climate Studies

Bugs in the Data: How ImageNet Misrepresents Biodiversity

ClimaBench: A Benchmark Dataset For Climate Change Text Understanding in English

Physiological and immune response of oysters to climate change as a function of diet and tidal regime

Effect of morphological, phenological variations and morph frequencies on population genetic diversity along an altitudinal gradient in heterostylous Primula denticulata

Effects of temperature acclimation on thermal performance for sea lamprey larvae

Finding the missing pieces of an ecological puzzle to assess the climate vulnerability of amphibians

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