Human cumulative culture: a comparative perspective

@article{Dean2014HumanCC,
  title={Human cumulative culture: a comparative perspective},
  author={Lewis G. Dean and Gillian L. Vale and Kevin N. Laland and Emma Flynn and Rachel L. Kendal},
  journal={Biological Reviews},
  year={2014},
  volume={89}
}
Many animals exhibit social learning and behavioural traditions, but human culture exhibits unparalleled complexity and diversity, and is unambiguously cumulative in character. These similarities and differences have spawned a debate over whether animal traditions and human culture are reliant on homologous or analogous psychological processes. Human cumulative culture combines high‐fidelity transmission of cultural knowledge with beneficial modifications to generate a ‘ratcheting’ in… 
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238 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
12
Background Citations
71
Methods Citations
1
Results Citations
3

238 Citations

From cultural traditions to cumulative culture: parameterizing the differences between human and nonhuman culture.
Cognition and Culture in Evolutionary Context
TLDR
The main contributions of this approach to the science of culture are its emphasis on the integration of information on mechanisms, function, and evolution, and on mechanistic factors located at different levels of the biological hierarchy.
Evolutionary neuroscience of cumulative culture
TLDR
This approach reconciles currently competing accounts of the origins of human culture and develops the concept of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.
Primate Cognition and the Origins of Human Culture
  • D. Simon
  • Biology
    Insights of Anthropology
  • 2019
TLDR
Evidence that non-human primates indeed do have culture is presented, and several factors which might account for the relative sophistication of human culture are considered: Learning, the ratchet effect, conformity, collaboration, meta-representation, and imagination.
The Study of Culture and Evolution across Disciplines
  • A. Mesoudi
  • Biology, Psychology
    The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior
  • 2018
TLDR
All the while, the traditional social sciences have remained steadfastly unwilling to accept that evolutionary approaches to human behaviour have any merit or relevance, and indeed have abandoned the scientific method in favour of more politically motivated interpretive methods.
Teaching and curiosity: sequential drivers of cumulative cultural evolution in the hominin lineage
TLDR
It is suggested that the best explanation for culture began to be truly cumulative around 500,000 years ago is the emergence of verbal teaching, which not only requires language and thus probably coevolved with the latter’s evolution but also reflects the overall increase in proactive cooperation due to extensive allomaternal care.
Acquisition of a socially learned tool use sequence in chimpanzees: Implications for cumulative culture.
Why do chimpanzees have diverse behavioral repertoires yet lack more complex cultures? Invention and social information use in a cumulative task
All Innovations are Equal, but Some More than Others: (Re)integrating Modification Processes to the Origins of Cumulative Culture
TLDR
It is argued that a possible impediment for cumulative culture in nonhuman animals may in fact reside not so much in the fidelity of their social transmission but rather in the constraints, internal and external, on their capacity to modify complex, hierarchically structured cultural recipes.
Cumulative culture in nonhumans: overlooked findings from Japanese monkeys?
TLDR
The reassessment of the Koshima ethnography is preliminary and nonquantitative, but it raises the possibility that cumulative culture, at least in a simple form, occurs spontaneously and adaptively in other primates and nonhumans in nature.
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