ArticlePLoS computational biology2018
The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, sociality, and life history.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Choline, Neurological Development and Brain Function: A Systematic Review Focusing on the First 1000 Days.Nutrients · 2020Pooled it
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- One Earth + One Health: An Agile, Evolutionary, System-of-Systems Convergence Paradigm.Environmental science & technology · 2026Review
- Making sense of the extraordinary - An investigation of the content and prevalence of appraisals of nonordinary experiences.PloS one · 2026Article
- Article
- The coevolution of cognition and sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Evolutionary-developmental (evo-devo) dynamics of hominin brain size.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Young people on social media in a globalized world: self-optimization in highly competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Aggressive Mimicry and the Evolution of the Human Cognitive Niche.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Evolution of cortical geometry and its link to function, behaviour and ecology.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Multilevel cultural evolution: From new theory to practical applications.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Neuroplasticity enables bio-cultural feedback in Paleolithic stone-tool making.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Bridging the Gap Between Believing and Memory Functions.Europe's journal of psychology · 2023Article
- Dendritic Spines: Synaptogenesis and Synaptic Pruning for the Developmental Organization of Brain Circuits.Advances in neurobiology · 2023Article
- Biological adaptations for cultural transmission?Biology letters · 2022Review
- Paradox of diversity in the collective brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Believing and social interactions: effects on bodily expressions and personal narratives.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Modeling Discontinuous Cultural Evolution: The Impact of Cross-Domain Transfer.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the last few million years, the hominin brain more than tripled in size. Comparisons across evolutionary lineages suggest that this expansion may be part of a broader trend toward larger, more complex brains in many taxa. Efforts to understand the evolutionary forces driving brain expansion have focused on climatic, ecological, and social factors. Here, building on existing research on learning, we analytically and computationally model the predictions of two closely related hypotheses: The Cultural Brain Hypothesis and the Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis. The Cultural Brain Hypothesis posits that brains have been selected for their ability to store and manage information, acquired through asocial or social learning. The model of the Cultural Brain Hypothesis reveals relationships between brain size, group size, innovation, social learning, mating structures, and the length of the juvenile period that are supported by the existing empirical literature. From this model, we derive a set of predictions-the Cumulative Cultural Brain Hypothesis-for the conditions that favor an autocatalytic take-off characteristic of human evolution. This narrow evolutionary pathway, created by cumulative cultural evolution, may help explain the rapid expansion of human brains and other aspects of our species' life history and psychology.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.