Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies

Technology plays a central role in all human lifestyles, from foraging to industrialized economies, so understanding what causes technological complexity to vary over time and space is central to understanding the diversity of human adaptive strategies. While technology provides adaptive solutions to physical problems, it also comes at a cost, leading to trade-offs. Here, we focus on the optimization of technological complexity in small-scale societies, reflecting this balance between costs and benefits. Specifically, we study the relationship between toolkit richness T, defined as the number of distinct tools in a toolkit, and tool-part richness $P$, the number of unique components within a toolkit. Using data from ethnographic studies, we show that toolkit richness scales sublinearly with tool-part richness as T ~ P0.7. This result reveals diminishing returns, where each new part has a decreasing impact on toolkit richness due to material and economic limits. Here we present the dataset.