After many waves of out-migration from Africa, different human populations evolved within a great diversity of physical and community ecologies. These ambient ecologies should have at least partially determined the selective pressures that shaped the evolution and geographical distribution of human cognitive abilities across different parts of the world. Three different ecological hypotheses have been advanced to explain human global variation in intelligence: (1) cold winters theory (Lynn, 1991), (2) parasite stress theory (Eppig, Fincher, & Thornhill, 2010), and (3) life history theory (Rushton, 1999, 2000). To examine and summarize the relations among these and other ecological parameters, we divided a sample of 98 national polities for which we had sufficient information into zoogeographical regions (Wallace, 1876; Holt et al., 2013). We selected only those regions for this analysis that were still inhabited mostly by the aboriginal populations that were present there prior to the fifteenth century AD. We found that these zoogeographical regions explained 71.4% of the variance among national polities in our best measure of human cognitive ability, and also more concisely encapsulated the preponderance of the more specific information contained within the sampled set of continuous ecological parameters.

在经历了从非洲的大量移民潮之后，不同的人口在各种各样的自然生态和社区生态中进化。这些环境生态应该至少部分地决定了选择压力，这些选择压力决定了世界不同地区人类认知能力的演变和地理分布。提出了三种不同的生态学假设来解释人类在智力方面的全球变化：（1）寒冷的冬天理论（Lynn，1991），（2）寄生物应力理论（Eppig，Fincher和Thornhill，2010），以及（3）生活史理论（Rushton，1999，2000）。为了检查和总结这些生态参数与其他生态参数之间的关系，我们将98个国家政府样本中有足够信息的样本划分为动物地理区域（Wallace，1876； Holt等人，2013）。为了进行分析，我们只选择了那些仍然大部分被公元15世纪之前存在的原住民居住的地区。我们发现，这些动物地理区域以我们对人类认知能力的最佳衡量方式解释了国家之间71.4％的方差，并且还更简洁地封装了包含在连续生态参数样本集中的更具体信息的优势。