ArticleScientific reports2016
Revealing patterns of cultural transmission from frequency data: equilibrium and non-equilibrium assumptions.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Opaque Social Instruments: A Cultural Evolutionary Approach to Pleistocene Symbolic Artifacts.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Article
- Social dynamics signals in archaeological time-series: How cultural transmission and production biases shape assemblage diversity.PloS one · 2026Article
- Assessing geometric microliths as cultural markers through an analysis of shape variation and projectile performance.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The cultural transmission of Ongagawa style pottery in the prehistoric Japan: quantitative analysis on three-dimensional data of archaeological pottery in the early Yayoi period.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Strategic housing decisions and the evolution of urban settlements: optimality modelling and empirical application in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- A Simple Model of the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Statistical signals of copying are robust to time- and space-averaging.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Impact of cultural and genetic structure on food choices along the Silk Road.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).Nature communications · 2021Article
- The shortlist effect: nestedness contributions as a tool to explain cultural success.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- The spread of agriculture in Iberia through Approximate Bayesian Computation and Neolithic projectile tools.PloS one · 2021Article
- Neutral syndrome.Nature human behaviour · 2020Review
- The pace of modern culture.Nature human behaviour · 2020Article
- Classifying evolutionary forces in language change using neural networks.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Article
- Cultural linkage: the influence of package transmission on cultural dynamics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Conformity bias in the cultural transmission of music sampling traditions.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Cultural conformity generates extremely stable traditions in bird song.Nature communications · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A long tradition of cultural evolutionary studies has developed a rich repertoire of mathematical models of social learning. Early studies have laid the foundation of more recent endeavours to infer patterns of cultural transmission from observed frequencies of a variety of cultural data, from decorative motifs on potsherds to baby names and musical preferences. While this wide range of applications provides an opportunity for the development of generalisable analytical workflows, archaeological data present new questions and challenges that require further methodological and theoretical discussion. Here we examine the decorative motifs of Neolithic pottery from an archaeological assemblage in Western Germany, and argue that the widely used (and relatively undiscussed) assumption that observed frequencies are the result of a system in equilibrium conditions is unwarranted, and can lead to incorrect conclusions. We analyse our data with a simulation-based inferential framework that can overcome some of the intrinsic limitations in archaeological data, as well as handle both equilibrium conditions and instances where the mode of cultural transmission is time-variant. Results suggest that none of the models examined can produce the observed pattern under equilibrium conditions, and suggest. instead temporal shifts in the patterns of cultural transmission.
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