ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Behavioural variation in 172 small-scale societies indicates that social learning is the main mode of human adaptation.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Emerging capitalism and sociocultural niche construction in early modern Greece.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Social learning preserves both useful and useless theories by canalizing learners' exploration.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Opening strategies in the game of go from feudalism to superhuman AI.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Cultural transmission among hunter-gatherers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The refinement paradox and cumulative cultural evolution: Complex products of collective improvement favor conformist outcomes, blind copying, and hyper-credulity.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evaluation via simulation of statistical corrections for network nonindependence.Health services & outcomes research methodology · 2024Article
- Institutional complexity emerges from socioecological complexity in small-scale human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Group Formation and the Evolution of Human Social Organization.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Norm reinforcement, not conformity or environmental factors, is predicted to sustain cultural variation.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Climate change adaptation and the back of the invisible hand.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Long-term gene-culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Ecological variation and institutionalized inequality in hunter-gatherer societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Flexible learning, rather than inveterate innovation or copying, drives cumulative knowledge gain.Science advances · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The behavioural variation among human societies is vast and unmatched in the animal world. It is unclear whether this variation is due to variation in the ecological environment or to differences in cultural traditions. Underlying this debate is a more fundamental question: is the richness of humans' behavioural repertoire due to non-cultural mechanisms, such as causal reasoning, inventiveness, reaction norms, trial-and-error learning and evoked culture, or is it due to the population-level dynamics of cultural transmission? Here, we measure the relative contribution of environment and cultural history in explaining the behavioural variation of 172 Native American tribes at the time of European contact. We find that the effect of cultural history is typically larger than that of environment. Behaviours also persist over millennia within cultural lineages. This indicates that human behaviour is not predominantly determined by single-generation adaptive responses, contra theories that emphasize non-cultural mechanisms as determinants of human behaviour. Rather, the main mode of human adaptation is social learning mechanisms that operate over multiple generations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.