Looking across human societies reveals regularities in the languages that people speak and the concepts that they use. One explanation that has been proposed for these "cultural universals" is differences in the ease with which people learn particular languages and concepts. A difference in learnability means that languages and concepts possessing a particular property are more likely to be acc...

Culturally transmitted behavior can be structured in its performance both geographically and temporally, in terms of where and when implements are made and used on the landscape (what Ingold calls "the taskscape"). Yet cultural transmission theory has not yet explored the consequences of behaviors transmitted differently due to their enactment at different taskscape locations, what Tostevin cal...

years in applying the theoretical and methodological tenets of Darwinian evolutionary theory to the archaeological record (e.g., Barton and Clark 1997; Dunnell 1980; Lipo et al. 1997, 2005; Lyman and O’Brien 1998; Neiman 1995; O’Brien 1996; O’Brien and Lyman 2000, 2002, 2003a; Shennan 2002; Shennan and Wilkinson 2001). One of the key theoretical tenets of any theory of Darwinian evolution, be i...

Cultural transmission is essentially the idea that beliefs and values are passed from generation to generation. The question I would like to address in this paper is how does this happen? In particular, what is the mechanism? In the absence of a deep understanding of the process by which people come to have similar ideas, a variety of metaphors have been used. The purpose of this paper is to ou...

Many animals have socially transmitted behavioural traditions, but human culture appears unique in that it is cumulative, i.e. human cultural traits increase in diversity and complexity over time. It is often suggested that high-fidelity cultural transmission is necessary for cumulative culture to occur through refinement, a process known as 'ratcheting', but this hypothesis has never been form...

Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive and affective processes combine with patterns of social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of ‘representations’— ideas, beliefs, schemas, or mental models. Recently, cognitive anthropologists have made three criticisms of such models: First, mental representations are non-discrete. Second, cultural transmission is hig...

OBJECTIVE The current study aimed to describe what proportion of variation in adult alcohol intake is attributable to genetic differences among individuals and what proportion to differences in environmental experiences individuals have been exposed to. Effects of age, gender, spousal resemblance, and cultural transmission of alcohol intake from parents to offspring were taken into account. M...

The application of phylogenetic techniques to the documentation of cultural history can present a distorted picture due to horizontal transmission and blending. Moreover, the units of cultural transmission must be communicable concepts, rather than conveniently measurable attributes, and relatedness between elements of culture often resides at the conceptual level, something not captured by phy...

A long tradition of cultural evolutionary studies has developed a rich repertoire of mathematical models of social learning. Early studies have laid the foundation of more recent endeavours to infer patterns of cultural transmission from observed frequencies of a variety of cultural data, from decorative motifs on potsherds to baby names and musical preferences. While this wide range of applica...

Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in order to better evaluate our closest relatives' cultural capacities. Previous studies using tran...