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The distances between vocabularies were computed as the normalized edit distances (LDND) used in check details Wichmann et al. (2011). Given two words from different varieties for the same concept, the edit distance is the number of changes it takes to convert one word to the other, normalized by maximum number of possible edits. Similar words have a lower distance. The distance between varieties was taken as the average distance between each word in the vocabulary. The LDND measure further normalizes the distance between varieties by eliminating meaning-specific variation (see Wichmann et al.). Distances between provinces were calculated as above. Data were available for 139 languages from 18 provinces. Again, the differences in proportion of rice growing correlated significantly with the difference in vocabulary (r = 0.38, p = 0.0002, 10,000 permutations). A tree of historical relations can be estimated from the historical distances using hierarchical clustering. Figure ?Figure11 shows this tree (from the first dataset) projected onto a map of China. The ��rice�Cwheat�� border from Talhelm et al. is highlighted. This separates the high rice production areas in the south from low rice production areas in the north. It's clear that the historical relations align with this border. Indeed, the root of the tree splits provinces in the north from those in the south and sub-branches of the tree spread east-to-west. Figure 1 A tree of historical relationships between language varieties constructed from hierarchical clustering of similarities in vocabulary. Provinces on the ��rice�Cwheat�� border are highlighted in gray (provinces south of the border produce ... These results suggest that the prevalence of rice growing is related to cultural contact. This means that a more careful consideration of historical relationships between provinces is warranted before the link between rice production and collectivism can be confirmed. One part of Talhelm et al.'s study which may be more robust to the findings presented here are the results at the county-level for neighboring provinces. This analysis uses more fine-grained groups than the varieties used in this paper. However, cultural contact can also be assessed at the level of accent and dialect (e.g., Spruit et al., 2009). Further surveys similar to Talhelm et al.'s may consider eliciting linguistic data from participants, as well as psychological or sociological data, with the aim of using them as controls for relatedness. In general, researchers should be wary of correlations that do not control for shared cultural history. On a more positive note, as an increasing amount of data becomes available, cultural and linguistic data can be used together with other sources to investigate human history. Conflict of interest statement The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.