Ancestry, Language and Culture

Abstract

Populations that share a more recent common ancestry exchange goods, capital, innovations and technologies more intensively, but they also tend to fight more with each other.1 Why does ancestral distance matter for these outcomes? In this chapter, we argue that when populations split apart and diverge over the long span of history their cultural traits also diverge. These cultural traits include language and religion but also a broader set of norms, values and attitudes that are transmitted intergenerationally and therefore display persistence over long stretches of time. In turn, these traits introduce barriers to interactions and communication between societies, in proportion to how far they have drifted from each other.