Multilevel processes and cultural adaptation: Examples from past and present small-scale societies

2. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of research frameworks that emphasise the importance 3. of understanding adaptive processes that happen at different levels. We contribute to this growing 4. body of literature by exploring how cultural (mal)adaptive dynamics relate to multilevel 5. social-ecological processes occurring at different scales, where the lower levels combine into new 6. units with new organizations, functions, and emergent properties or collective behaviours. After a 7. brief review of the concept of "cultural adaptation" from the perspective of cultural evolutionary 8. theory, the core of the paper is constructed around the exploration of multilevel processes 9. occurring at the temporal, spatial, social and political scales. We do so by using insights from 10. cultural evolutionary theory and by examining small-scale societies as case studies. In each 11. section, we discuss the importance of the selected scale for understanding cultural adaptation and 12. then present an example that illustrates how multilevel processes in the selected scale help explain 13. observed patterns in the cultural adaptive process. The last section of the paper discusses the 14. potential of modelling and computer simulation for studying multilevel processes in cultural 15. adaptation. We conclude by highlighting how elements from cultural evolutionary theory might enrich 16. the multilevel process discussion in resilience theory. 17.