Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:54:54.652Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fidelity and the Speed of the Treadmill: The Combined Impact of Population Size, Transmission Fidelity, and Selection on the Accumulation of Cultural Complexity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Claes Andersson  and
Petter Törnberg
Claes Andersson*
Affiliation:
Division for Physical Resource Theory, Department of Energy and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
Petter Törnberg
Affiliation:
Division for Physical Resource Theory, Department of Energy and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden
*
([email protected], corresponding author)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Human culture signifies the emergence of an entirely new domain of existence: an event in natural history that is paralleled only by the Cambrian Explosion in terms of creativity and scope. The question of how human culture—as opposed to its animal counterparts—came to become open-endedly creative and cumulative is therefore one of wide and general scientific importance. Several causal factors have been proposed to date to explain this unique quality, including population size, transmission fidelity, pedagogy, and creativity. Inquiries, however, tend to focus exclusively on one factor at a time, leaving us blind to important issues regarding their relative roles and combined action. We here combine two models, one focusing on population size and the other on imitation fidelity, as constraints and enablers of evolutionary cumulativity. We explore how these factors interact to promote and inhibit evolutionary cumulativity and how the synthetic model compares to the original models individually and to empirical and experimental data. We report several findings that do not emerge in the models that we combine individually. For example, group size is found to be important for small but not for larger groups, an observation that moreover substantially improves agreement with data.

La cultura humana significa la aparición de un dominio de la existencia completamente nuevo: un acontecimiento en la historia natural sólo equivalente a la explosión cámbrica en términos de creatividad y alcance. La cuestión de cómo la cultura humana –a diferencia de sus equivalencias entre los animales –se convirtió en creativa y acumulativa se convierte por lo tanto en un tema de importancia científica amplia y general. Hasta la fecha se han propuesto varios factores causales para explicar esta cualidad única, incluyendo el tamaño de la población, la fidelidad de la transmisión, la pedagogía y la creatividad. Las investigaciones, sin embargo, tienden a centrarse exclusivamente en uno de estos factores a la vez, lo que nos deja ciegos a cuestiones importantes con respecto a sus roles relativos y a su interacción. En esta investigación combinamos dos de estos modelos, uno que se centra en el tamaño de la población y el otro en la fidelidad de imitación como restricciones y facilitadores de la acumulación evolutiva. Exploramos también cómo estos factores interactúan para promover e inhibir dicha acumulación evolutiva, cómo el modelo sintético se compara con los modelos originales de forma individual y con datos empíricos y experimentales. Presentamos varios hallazgos que no surgen en los modelos que combinamos de forma individual. Por ejemplo, se encuentra que el tamaño del grupo es importante para grupos pequeños pero no para los grupos más grandes; observación que, además, mejora sustancialmente la concordancia con los datos.

Type
Reports
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 81 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 576 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References Cited

Andersson, Claes 2011 Palaeolithic Punctuations and Equilibria: Did Retention Rather Than Invention Limit Technological Evolution? PalaeoAnthropology 2011:243-259.Google Scholar
Andersson, Claes 2013 Fidelity and the Emergence of Stable and Cumulative Sociotechnical Systems. PalaeoAnthropology 2013:88– 103.Google Scholar
Andersson, Claes, and Read, Dwight W. 2014 Group Size and Cultural Complexity. Nature 511(7507):E1.Google Scholar
Andersson, Claes, and Read, Dwight W. 2016 The Evolution of Cultural Complexity: Not by the Treadmill Alone. Current Anthropology 57(3):261-286.Google Scholar
Baldini, Ryan 2013 Revisiting the Effect of Population Size on Cumulative Cultural Evolution. Journal of Cognition and Culture 15: 320-336.Google Scholar
Bell, Adrian V. 2014 Cultural Evolution and the Way We Count. Proceedings of the National Academy 111:1227-1228.Google Scholar
Bell, Adrian V. 2015 Linking Observed Learning Patterns to the Evolution of Cultural Complexity. Current Anthropology 56:277– 281.Google Scholar
Buchanan, Briggs, O’Brien, Michael J., and Collard, Mark 2015 Drivers of Technological Richness in Prehistoric Texas: An Archaeological Test of the Population Size and Environmental Risk Hypotheses. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 1-10. DOI 10.1007/s12520-015-0245-4.Google Scholar
Chaisson, Eric J. 2014 Practical Applications of Cosmology to Human Society. Natural Science 6:767-796.Google Scholar
Claidière, Nicolas, and Sperber, Dan 2010 Imitation Explains the Propagation, Not the Stability of Animal Culture. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 277(1681):651-659.Google Scholar
Collard, Mark, Buchanan, Briggs and O’Brien, Michael J. 2013 Population Size as an Explanation for Patterns in the Paleolithic Archaeological Record. Current Anthropology 54(S8):S388–S396.Google Scholar
Collard, Mark, Buchanan, Briggs O’Brien, Michael J., and Scholnick, Jonathan 2013 Risk, Mobility or Population Size? Drivers of Tech Technological Richness Among Contact-Period Western North American Hunter–Gatherers. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 368(1630): 20120412.Google Scholar
Collard, Mark, Kemery, Michael and Banks, Samantha 2005 Causes of Toolkit Variation among Hunter-Gatherers: A Test of Four Competing Hypotheses. Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal Canadien d’Archéologie 29(1):1– 19.Google Scholar
Csibra, Gergely, and Gergely, György 2009 Natural Pedagogy. Trends In Cognitive Sciences 13(4):148-153.Google Scholar
Csibra, Gergely, and Gergely, György 2011 Natural Pedagogy as Evolutionary Adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 366(1567):1149-1157.Google Scholar
Derex, Maxime, Beugin, Marie-Pauline, Godelle, Bernard and Raymond, Michel 2013 Experimental Evidence for the Influence of Group Size on Cultural Complexity. Nature 503(7476):389– 391.Google Scholar
Derex, Maxime, Beugin, Marie-Pauline, Godelle, Bernard and Raymond, Michel 2014 Derex et al. Reply. Nature 511(7507):E2.Google Scholar
Domingo, Esteban, Sheldon, Julie and Perales, Celia 2012 Viral Quasispecies Evolution. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 76 (2):159-216.Google Scholar
Drake, John W., Charlesworth, Brian Charlesworth, Deborah, and Crow, James F. 1998 Rates of Spontaneous Mutation. Genetics 148:1667– 1686.Google Scholar
Eigen, Manfred 1971 Self-Organization of Matter and the Evolution of Biological Macromolecules. Naturwissenschaften 58(10):465– 523.Google Scholar
Eigen, Manfred, and Schuster, Peter 1977 The Hypercycle. A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Naturwissenschaften 64(11):541-565.Google Scholar
Enquist, Magnus, Strimling, Pontus Eriksson, Kimmo, Laland, Kevin and Sjöstrand, Jonas 2010 One Cultural Parent Makes No Culture. Animal Behaviour 79(6):1353-1362.Google Scholar
Flannery, Kent V. 1976 The Early Mesoamerican Village . Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Gergely, György, and Csibra, Gergely 2006 Sylvia's Recipe: The Role of Imitation and Pedagogy in the Transmission of Human Culture. In Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Human Interaction , edited by Enfield, Nicholas J. and Levinson, Stephen C., pp. 229-255. Berg Publishers, Oxford, United Kingdom.Google Scholar
Henrich, Joseph 2004 Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses: The Tasmanian case. American Antiquity 69(2):197-214.Google Scholar
Henrich, Joseph 2010 The Evolution of Innovation-Enhancing Institutions. In Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions from Evolutionary Anthropology , edited by O’Brien, Michael J. and Shennan, Stephen J., pp. 99-120. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Horner, Victoria, and Whiten, Andrew 2005 Causal Knowledge and Imitation/Emulation Switching in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and Children (Homo sapiens). Animal Cognition 8(3):164–181.Google Scholar
Hovers, Erella, and Kuhn, Steven L. (editors) 2006 Transitions before the Transition: Evolution and Stability in the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age . Springer Science, New York.Google Scholar
Keeley, Lawrence H. 1988 Hunter-Gatherer Economic Complexity and “Population Pressure”: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 7(4):373-411.Google Scholar
Kempe, Marius, and Mesoudi, Alex 2014 An Experimental Demonstration of the Effect of Group Size on Cultural Accumulation. Evolution and Human Behavior 35(4):285-290.Google Scholar
Kline, Michelle A., and Boyd, Robert 2010 Population Size Predicts Technological Complexity in Oceania. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277(1693):2559-2564.Google Scholar
Kobayashi, Yutaka, and Aoki, Kenichi 2012 Innovativeness, Population Size and Cumulative Cultural Evolution. Theoretical Population Biology 82(1):38– 47.Google Scholar
Lalueza-Fox, Carles, Rosas, Antonio Estalrrich, Almudena, Gigli, Elena Campos, Paula F., García-Tabernero, Antonio, García-Vargas, Samuel, Sánchez-Quinto, Federico, Ramírez, Oscar, Civit, Sergi Bastir, Markus, Huguet, Rosa Santamaría M., David Gilbert, Thomas P., Willerslev, Eske and Marco de la Rasilla 2011 Genetic Evidence for Patrilocal Mating Behavior among Neandertal Groups. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(1):250-253.Google Scholar
Leaf, Murray J., and Read, Dwight W. 2012 Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane . Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland.Google Scholar
McBrearty, Sally 2007 Down with the Revolution. In The Human Revolution Revisited , edited by Mellars, Paul A., Boyle, Katie Bar-Yosef, Ofer, and Stringer, Christopher, pp. 133-151. Mc-Donald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom.Google Scholar
McBrearty, Sally, and Brooks, Alison S. 2000 The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior. Journal of Human Evolution 39:453-563.Google Scholar
Mesoudi, Alex 2011 Variable Cultural Acquisition Costs Constrain Cumulative Cultural Evolution. PloS one 6(3):e18239.Google Scholar
Moffett, Mark W. 2013 Human Identity and the Evolution of Societies. Human Nature 24(3):219-267.Google Scholar
Muthukrishna, Michael, Shulman, Ben W., Vasilescu, Vlad and Henrich, Joseph 2013 Sociality Influences Cultural Complexity. Proceeding of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 281:20132511.Google Scholar
Nakahashi, Wataru 2014 The Effect of Cultural Interaction on Cumulative Cultural Evolution. Journal of Theoretical Biology 352:6– 15.Google Scholar
Nilsson, Martin, and Snoad, Nigel 2000 Error Thresholds for Quasispecies on Dynamic Fitness Landscapes. Physical Review Letters 84(1):191-194.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Michael J., and Bentley, R. Alexander 2011 Stimulated Variation and Cascades: Two Processes in the Evolution of Complex Technological Systems. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:309– 335.Google Scholar
Oswalt, Wendell H. 1976 An Anthropological Analysis of Food-Getting Technologies . Wiley, New York.Google Scholar
Powell, Adam, Shennan, Stephen and Thomas, Mark G. 2009 Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior. Science 324(5932):1298– 1301.Google Scholar
Powell, Adam, Shennan, Stephen and Thomas, Mark G. 2010 Demography and Variation in the Accumulation of Culturally Inherited Skills. In Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions from Evolutionary Anthropology , edited by O’Brien, Michael J. and Shennan, Stephen, pp. 137-160. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Querbes, Adrien, Vaesen, Krist and Wybo Houkes 2014 Complexity and Demographic Explanations of Cumulative Culture. PloS one 9(7):e102543.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2002 A Multitrajectory, Competition Model of Emergent Complexity in Human Social Organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99(Suppl. 3):7251– 7256.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2003 The Emergence of Order from Disorder as a Form of Self Organization. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory 9(3):195-225.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2006 Tasmanian Knowledge and Skill: Maladaptive Imitation or Adequate Technology? American Antiquity 71:164– 184.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2008a Artifact Classification: A Conceptual and Methodological Approach . Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2008b An Interaction Model for Resource Implement Complexity Based on Risk and Number of Annual Moves. American Antiquity 73:599-625.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2009 The Misuse of a Mathematical Model: The Tasmanian Case (Reply to Henrich's Response). UCLA: Human Complex Systems.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2012a Population Size Does Not Predict Artifact Complexity: Analysis of Data from Tasmania, Arctic Hunter-Gatherers, and Oceania. UCLA: Human Complex Systems.Google Scholar
Read, Dwight W. 2012b How Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Social Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies . Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California.Google Scholar
Richerson, Peter J. 2013 Group Size Determines Cultural Complexity. Nature 503:351-352.Google Scholar
Richerson, Peter, Baldini, Ryan Bell, Adrian, Demps, Kathryn Frost, Karl, Hillis, Vicken Mathew, Sarah, Narr, Nicole Newson, Lesley, Newton, Emily Ross, Cody, Smaldino, Paul Timothy Waring, and Zefferman, Matthew R. 2015 Cultural Group Selection Plays an Essential Role in Explaining Human Cooperation: A Sketch of the Evidence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (39):e30.Google Scholar
Shea, Nicholas 2009 Imitation as an Inheritance System. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 364(1528):2429-2443.Google Scholar
Shennan, Stephen 2001 Demography and Cultural Innovation: A Model and Its Implications for the Emergence of Modern Human Culture. Cambridge Archeological Journal 11:5-16.Google Scholar
Sterelny, Kim 2011 From Hominins to Humans: How Sapiens Became Behaviourally Modern. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 366(1566):809-822.Google Scholar
Taylor, Timothy 2010 The Arti?cial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution . Palgrave Macmillan, New York.Google Scholar
Tehrani, Jamshid J., and Riede, Felix 2008 Towards an Archaeology of Pedagogy: Learning, Teaching and the Generation of Material Culture Traditions. World Archaeology 40:316-331.Google Scholar
Tennie, Claudio, Call, Josep and Tomasello, Michael 2009 Ratcheting up the Ratchet: On the Evolution of Cumulative Culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 364(1528):2405-2415.Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael 1991 Chimpanzee Culture? National Student Speech Language Hearing Association Journal 18:73-75.Google Scholar
Torrence, Robin 1983 Time Budgeting and Hunter-Gatherer Technology. In Hunter-Gatherer Economy in Prehistory , edited Bailey, by G., pp. 11-22. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Torrence, Robin 1989 Re-Tooling: Towards a Behavioral Theory of Stone Tools. In Time, Energy and Stone Tools , edited by Torrence, Robin, pp. 57-66. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Tostevin, Gilbert B. 2007 Social Intimacy, Artefact Visibility and Acculturation Models of Neanderthal Modern Human Interaction. In Rethinking the Human Revolution: New Behavioural and Biological Perspectives on the Origin and Dispersal of Modern Humans , edited by Mellars, Paul A., pp. 341-357. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom.Google Scholar
Torrence, Robin 2012 Seeing Lithics . Oxbow Books, Oxford, United Kingdom.Google Scholar
Vaesen, Krist 2012 The Cognitive Bases of Human Tool Use. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35(4):203-218.Google Scholar
Vallverdú, Josep, Vaquero, Manuel Cáceres, Isabel, Allué, Ethel, Rosell, Jordi Saladié, Palmira, Chacón, Gema, Ollé, Andreu, Canals, Antoni Sala, Robert, Courty, M. A., and Carbonell, Eudald 2010 Sleeping Activity Area within the Site Structure of Archaic Human Groups: Evidence from Abric Romaní Level N Combustion Activity Areas. Current Anthropology 51:137-145.Google Scholar
Vernor, Vinge 1993 The Coming Technological Singularity. Whole Earth Review 81:88-95.Google Scholar
Vigilant, Linda, and Langergraber, Kevin E. 2011 Inconclusive Evidence for Patrilocality in Neandertals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(18):E87.Google Scholar
Whiten, Andrew, McGuigan, Nicola Marshall-Pescini, Sarah, and Hopper, Lydia M. 2009 Emulation, Imitation, Over-Imitation and the Scope of Culture for Child and Chimpanzee. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 364(1528):2417-2428.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William 1986 Developmental Constraints, Generative Entrenchment, and the Innate-Acquired Distinction. In Integrating Scienti?c Disciplines , edited by Bechtel, William, pp. 185-208. Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William 2001 Generative Entrenchment and the Developmental Systems Approach to Evolutionary Process. In Cycles of Contingency , edited by Oyama, Susan and Griuths, Paul E., pp. 219-238. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, William C., and Griesemer, James R. 2007 Reproducing Entrenchments to Scaffold Culture: The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution. In Integrating Evolution and Development: From Theory to Practice , edited by Sansom, Roger and Brandon, Robert N., pp. 227-323. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Andersson and Törnberg Supplementary Material

Appendices

Download Andersson and Törnberg Supplementary Material(PDF)
PDF 955.8 KB