A ‘saharasian’ Climate-linked Geographical Pattern in the Global Cross-cultural Data on Human Behavior

In the 1980s, I published the first global maps of human behavior, constructed from variables taken from the Ethnographic Atlas data base of G.P. Murdock (1967) the Cross-Cultural Summary of R. Textor (1967), and other historical and anthropological sources.(DeMeo 1986, 1991, 1998). As will be summarized here, when the global cross-cultural data on human behavior are mapped, a previously-hidden climate-linked geographical pattern emerges, revealing the regions of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia — for which I have coined the term Saharasia — to have the highest historical levels of patrism: patriarchal authoritarian culture, with high levels of pain-infliction, trauma and destructive aggression directed towards infants, children, women, minority groups and other cultures, and high levels of overall male-dominance, social hierarchy and violence. A geographically mapped version of the ethnographic data, which have been widely used in their raw tabular form for cross-cultural social theory testing by scholars in many disciplines, demonstrates that historically, the farther one traveled from Saharasia, the more culture was defined by matrism: sex-positive, pleasure-oriented and socially-peaceful with many social institutions to nurture and protect the maternal-infant and male-female bonds. A broad band of intermediate matrist-patrist culture was found in the borderlands surrounding Saharasia proper, with isolated pockets of moderate patrism found in outlying areas of mostly-matrist Oceania and the New World, as the probable consequence of long-distance cultural diffusion.