Human cumulative culture: a comparative perspective

1 Human Cumulative Culture : a Comparative Perspective

Publisher's copyright statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Dean, L. G., Vale, G. L., Laland, K. N., Flynn, E. and Kendal, R. L. (2014), Human cumulative culture: a comparative perspective. Biological Reviews, 89 (2): 284 301, which has been published in nal form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/brv.12053. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in acco...

End state copying by humans (Homo sapiens): implications for a comparative perspective on cumulative culture.

It has been proposed that the uniqueness of human cumulative culture may be attributable to humans' greater orientation toward copying the process of behavior (imitation), as compared with the products (emulation), resulting in particularly high fidelity transmission. Following from previous work indicating that adult human participants can exhibit cumulative learning on the basis of product co...

Journal of Comparative Psychology End State Copying by Humans (Homo sapiens): Implications for a Comparative Perspective on Cumulative Culture

The Distinctively Human Mind : The Many Pillars of Cumulative Culture

T his chapter argues that there are multiple adaptations underlying the distinctiveness of the human mind. Careful analysis of the capacities that are involved in the creation, acquisition, and transmission of culture and cultural products suggests that it is very unlikely that these could be underlain by just one, or even a few, novel cognitive systems. On the contrary, there are at least eigh...

Evolutionary neuroscience of cumulative culture.

Culture suffuses all aspects of human life. It shapes our minds and bodies and has provided a cumulative inheritance of knowledge, skills, institutions, and artifacts that allows us to truly stand on the shoulders of giants. No other species approaches the extent, diversity, and complexity of human culture, but we remain unsure how this came to be. The very uniqueness of human culture is both a...