ArticleHuman nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.)2017
The Driving Forces of Cultural Complexity : Neanderthals, Modern Humans, and the Question of Population Size.
Article in Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Mechanisms of cultural diversity in urban populations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Computational reconstruction of evolutionary selection in human brain networks.Frontiers in neuroinformatics · 2025Article
- Forward and backward modeling of cultural evolutionary processes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Prestige bias in cultural evolutionary dynamics.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Conditions that favour cumulative cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Quantifying the scientific revolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Effective population size for culturally evolving traits.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Quantifying the spatial pattern of dialect words spreading from a central population.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Cultural evolution of conformity and anticonformity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- On the absence of a correlation between population size and 'toolkit size' in ethnographic hunter-gatherers.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- The niche construction of cultural complexity: interactions between innovations, population size and the environment.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Game-Changing Innovations: How Culture Can Change the Parameters of Its Own Evolution and Induce Abrupt Cultural Shifts.PLoS computational biology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
The forces driving cultural accumulation in human populations, both modern and ancient, are hotly debated. Did genetic, demographic, or cognitive features of behaviorally modern humans (as opposed to, say, early modern humans or Neanderthals) allow culture to accumulate to its current, unprecedented levels of complexity? Theoretical explanations for patterns of accumulation often invoke demographic factors such as population size or density, whereas statistical analyses of variation in cultural complexity often point to the importance of environmental factors such as food stability, in determining cultural complexity. Here we use both an analytical model and an agent-based simulation model to show that a full understanding of the emergence of behavioral modernity, and the cultural evolution that has followed, depends on understanding and untangling the complex relationships among culture, genetically determined cognitive ability, and demographic history. For example, we show that a small but growing population could have a different number of cultural traits from a shrinking population with the same absolute number of individuals in some circumstances.
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