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 datas..., , , # Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jwstqjqm8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jwstqjqm8)

## Description of the data and file structure

We compiled data on toolkits from previously published studies that examined the technology used by 127 small-scale societies in terms of the number of distinct tools and tool parts in their subsistence toolkits. Our coverage is global, but uneven, which we control for statistically. Two of the studies recorded toolkit data from 35 hunter-gatherer groups and 45 small-scale food-producing groups, including populations from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. One of the studies includes 21 populations from the Northwest Coast region of North America,  and the other regional study includes 17 Australian Aboriginal groups. In the few cases of overlap in these datasets when the same group was recorded in different studies, we used the data from the most recent source. All data u...,