ArticleNature communications2015
The foundations of the human cultural niche.
Article in Nature communications, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Evolutionary-Ecological Basis of Xenophilia.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Children use algorithm induction to discover patterns in data.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- In no uncertain terms: Group cohesion did not affect exploration and group decision making under low uncertainty.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Organizational Development as Generative Entrenchment.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The potential for effective reasoning guides children's preference for small group discussion over crowdsourcing.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Human biases limit cumulative innovation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural evolution and prehistoric demography.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Adaptive social networks promote the wisdom of crowds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Comparing Groups of Independent Solvers and Transmission Chains as Methods for Collective Problem-Solving.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Impact of network structure on collective learning: An experimental study in a data science competition.PloS one · 2020Article
- Cultural adaptation is maximised when intelligent individuals rarely think for themselves.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Increasing population size can inhibit cumulative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Cultural transmission in a food preparation task: The role of interactivity, innovation and storytelling.PloS one · 2019Article
- Social information can potentiate understanding despite inhibiting cognitive effort.Scientific reports · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Technological innovations have allowed humans to settle in habitats for which they are poorly suited biologically. However, our understanding of how humans produce complex technologies is limited. We used a computer-based experiment, involving humans and learning bots, to investigate how reasoning abilities, social learning mechanisms and population structure affect the production of virtual artefacts. We found that humans' reasoning abilities play an important role in the production of innovations, but that groups of individuals are able to produce artefacts that are more complex than any isolated individual can produce during the same amount of time. We show that this group-level ability to produce complex innovations is maximized when social information is easy to acquire and when individuals are organized into large and partially connected populations. These results suggest that the transition to behavioural modernity could have been triggered by a change in ancestral between-group interaction patterns.
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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.