ArticleScience advances2020
Hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality accelerates cumulative cultural evolution.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Freedom of choice supports social complexity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2026Article
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Higher-order interactions shape collective human behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Article
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Cultural evolution, social ratcheting and the evolution of human division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Multi-level societies: different tasks at different social levels.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Back(s) to basics: The concept of backing in stone tool technologies for tracing hominins' technical innovations.Evolutionary anthropology · 2024Review
- The contribution of movement to social network structure and spreading dynamics under simple and complex transmission.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Musical instruments, tools, language and genetic data reveal ancient hunter-gatherer networks.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Protracted development of stick tool use skills extends into adulthood in wild western chimpanzees.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Maintaining Transient Diversity Is a General Principle for Improving Collective Problem Solving.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Network structure shapes the impact of diversity in collective learning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A quantitative analysis of Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic cultural taxonomy and evolution in Europe.PloS one · 2024Article
- Widespread evidence for elephant exploitation by Last Interglacial Neanderthals on the North European plain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- 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
- Drone Observation for the Quantitative Study of Complex Multilevel Societies.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although multilevel sociality is a universal feature of human social organization, its functional relevance remains unclear. Here, we investigated the effect of multilevel sociality on cumulative cultural evolution by using wireless sensing technology to map inter- and intraband social networks among Agta hunter-gatherers. By simulating the accumulation of cultural innovations over the real Agta multicamp networks, we demonstrate that multilevel sociality accelerates cultural differentiation and cumulative cultural evolution. Our results suggest that hunter-gatherer social structures [based on (i) clustering of families within camps and camps within regions, (ii) cultural transmission within kinship networks, and (iii) high intercamp mobility] may have allowed past and present hunter-gatherers to maintain cumulative cultural adaptation despite low population density, a feature that may have been critical in facilitating the global expansion of
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