ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Evolutionary neuroscience of cumulative culture.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
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Who cites it
56 citing papers in PubMed.
- Brain structure and function in Homo naledi.Brain structure & function · 2026Review
- Drawing Animals in the Paleolithic: The Effect of Perspective and Abbreviation on Animal Recognition and Aesthetic Appreciation.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Analogies evolve by increasing transmission fidelity in the communication of complex information.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- A continuous record of early human stone tool production.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Article
- Atypical tool and object use in wild immature chimpanzees reveals developmental pathways to innovation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neural plasticity in early potters: Shape analysis and TMS-EEG co-registration trace the rise of a new motor skill.PloS one · 2025Article
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- The neural underpinnings of repeated skill transfer in human cultural evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The Evolution of Symbolic Thought: At the Intersection of Schizophrenia Psychopathology, Ethnoarchaeology, and Neuroscience.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2024Article
- Minds in movement: embodied cognition in the age of artificial intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The Evolution of the Optimization of Cognitive and Social Functions in the Cerebellum and Thereby the Rise of Homo sapiens Through Cumulative Culture.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2024Review
- Domestic dogs as a comparative model for social neuroscience: Advances and challenges.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Higher surface folding of the human premotor cortex is associated with better long-term learning capability.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Action observation reveals a network with divergent temporal and parietal cortex engagement in dogs compared with humans.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Evolution of cortical geometry and its link to function, behaviour and ecology.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Quantum Leaps in Human Biocultural Evolution and the Relationship to Cranial Capacity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Neuroplasticity enables bio-cultural feedback in Paleolithic stone-tool making.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Disembodiment and Language in Schizophrenia: An Integrated Psychopathological and Evolutionary Perspective.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2023Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Culture suffuses all aspects of human life. It shapes our minds and bodies and has provided a cumulative inheritance of knowledge, skills, institutions, and artifacts that allows us to truly stand on the shoulders of giants. No other species approaches the extent, diversity, and complexity of human culture, but we remain unsure how this came to be. The very uniqueness of human culture is both a puzzle and a problem. It is puzzling as to why more species have not adopted this manifestly beneficial strategy and problematic because the comparative methods of evolutionary biology are ill suited to explain unique events. Here, we develop a more particularistic and mechanistic evolutionary neuroscience approach to cumulative culture, taking into account experimental, developmental, comparative, and archaeological evidence. This approach reconciles currently competing accounts of the origins of human culture and develops the concept of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.
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