ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
The niche construction of cultural complexity: interactions between innovations, population size and the environment.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Mutual benefits of social learning and algorithmic mediation for cumulative culture.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Chimpanzees employ context-specific behavioral strategies within fission-fusion societies.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Strategic housing decisions and the evolution of urban settlements: optimality modelling and empirical application in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Modelling effects of inter-group contact on links between population size and cultural complexity.Biology letters · 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
- Internal and external factors affecting vaccination coverage: Modeling the interactions between vaccine hesitancy, accessibility, and mandates.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- Modeling how population size drives the evolution of birdsong, a functional cultural trait.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Carrying capacity, population density and the later Pleistocene expression of backed artefact manufacturing traditions in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural evolution and prehistoric demography.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The Role of the Learner in the Cultural Evolution of Vocalizations.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Article
- The origin of early Acheulean expansion in Europe 700 ka ago: new findings at Notarchirico (Italy).Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The importance of life history and population regulation for the evolution of social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Where innovations flourish: an ethnographic and archaeological overview of hunter-gatherer learning contexts.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- Cultural selection shapes network structure.Science advances · 2019Article
- The life history of learning: Demographic structure changes cultural outcomes.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Out of Africa by spontaneous migration waves.PloS one · 2019Article
- Nicotinamide as Independent Variable for Intelligence, Fertility, and Health: Origin of Human Creative Explosions?International journal of tryptophan research : IJTR · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Niche construction is a process through which organisms alter their environments and, in doing so, influence or change the selective pressures to which they are subject. 'Cultural niche construction' refers specifically to the effect of cultural traits on the selective environments of other biological or cultural traits and may be especially important in human evolution. In addition, the relationship between population size and cultural accumulation has been the subject of extensive debate, in part because anthropological studies have demonstrated a significant association between population size and toolkit complexity in only a subset of studied cultures. Here, we review the role of cultural innovation in constructing human evolutionary niches and introduce a new model to describe the accumulation of human cultural traits that incorporates the effects of cultural niche construction. We consider the results of this model in light of available data on human toolkit sizes across populations to help elucidate the important differences between food-gathering societies and food-producing societies, in which niche construction may be a more potent force. These results support the idea that a population's relationship with its environment, represented here by cultural niche construction, should be considered alongside population size in studies of cultural complexity.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.
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