ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2017
Greater than the sum of its parts? Modelling population contact and interaction of cultural repertoires.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pan-African model explainsbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The roles of cultural transmission and causal reasoning in the cultural evolution of technology.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Decoding the Dynamics of Cultural Change: A Cultural Evolution Approach to the Psychology of Acculturation.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2025Review
- Cultural processes and demography: implications for conservation and beyond.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- Innovation-facilitating networks create inequality.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Insights into drivers of mobility and cultural dynamics of African hunter-gatherers over the past 120 000 years.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Modelling effects of inter-group contact on links between population size and cultural complexity.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Human major transitions from the perspective of distributed adaptations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cultural specialization as a double-edged sword: division into specialized guilds might promote cultural complexity at the cost of higher susceptibility to cultural loss.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- A description and sensitivity analysis of the ArchMatNet agent-based model.PeerJ. Computer science · 2023Article
- Effective population size for culturally evolving traits.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Paradox of diversity in the collective brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- 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
- Pleistocene climate variability in eastern Africa influenced hominin evolution.Nature geoscience · 2022Article
- Hunter-gatherer foraging networks promote information transmission.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Beyond social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- A multilevel analytical framework for studying cultural evolution in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2020Review
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evidence for interactions between populations plays a prominent role in the reconstruction of historical and prehistoric human dynamics; these interactions are usually interpreted to reflect cultural practices or demographic processes. The sharp increase in long-distance transportation of lithic material between the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, for example, is seen as a manifestation of the cultural revolution that defined the transition between these epochs. Here, we propose that population interaction is not only a reflection of cultural change but also a potential driver of it. We explore the possible effects of inter-population migration on cultural evolution when migrating individuals possess core technological knowledge from their original population. Using a computational framework of cultural evolution that incorporates realistic aspects of human innovation processes, we show that migration can lead to a range of outcomes, including punctuated but transient increases in cultural complexity, an increase of cultural complexity to an elevated steady state and the emergence of a positive feedback loop that drives ongoing acceleration in cultural accumulation. Our findings suggest that population contact may have played a crucial role in the evolution of hominin cultures and propose explanations for observations of Palaeolithic cultural change whose interpretations have been hotly debated.
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