Data from: The global geography of human subsistence

How humans obtain food has dramatically reshaped ecosystems and altered
both the trajectory of human history and the characteristics of human
societies. Our species’ subsistence varies widely, from predominantly
foraging strategies, to plant-based agriculture and animal husbandry. The
extent to which environmental, social, and historical factors have driven
such variation is currently unclear. Prior attempts to resolve
long-standing debates on this topic have been hampered by an over-reliance
on narrative arguments, small and geographically-narrow samples, and by
contradictory findings. Here we overcome these methodological limitations
by applying multi-model inference tools developed in biogeography to a
global data set (818 societies). Although some have argued that unique
conditions and events determine each society’s particular subsistence
strategy, we find strong support for a general global pattern in which a
limited set of environmental, social, and historical factors predicts an
essential characteristic of all human groups: how we obtain our food.