Spatial evolution of human cultures inferred through Bayesian phylogenetic analysis

Abstract

Spatial distribution of human culture reflects both descent from the common ancestor and horizontal transmission among neighbouring populations. To analyse empirically documented geographical variations in cultural repertoire, we will describe a framework for Bayesian statistics in a spatially explicit model. To consider both horizontal transmission and mutation of the cultural trait in question, our method employs a network model in which populations are represented by nodes. Using algorithms borrowed from Bayesian phylogenetic analysis, we will perform a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to compute the posterior distributions of parameters, such as the rate of horizontal transmission and the mutation rates among trait variants, as well as the identity of trait variants in unobserved populations. Besides the inference of model parameters, our method enables the reconstruction of the genealogical tree of the focal trait, provided that the mutation rate is sufficiently small. We will also describe a heuristic algorithm to reduce the dimension of the parameter space explored in the MCMC method, where we simulate the coalescent process in the network of populations. Numerical examples show that our algorithms compute the posterior distribution of model parameters within a practical computation time, although the posterior distribution tends to be broad if we use uninformative priors.