ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
The value of teaching increases with tool complexity in cumulative cultural evolution.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Propagation and preservation of AI-discovered problem-solving strategies in human culture.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Costs of Early Stone Toolmaking cannot Establish the Presence of Know-how Copying.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Social tolerance and role model diversity increase tool use learning opportunities across chimpanzee ontogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2024Article
- Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Machine culture.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- Collaborative decision making is grounded in representations of other people's competence and effort.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- The cultural evolution of teaching.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Hybrid social learning in human-algorithm cultural transmission.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Costly teaching contributes to the acquisition of spear hunting skill among BaYaka forager adolescents.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Observational
- Field experiments find no evidence that chimpanzee nut cracking can be independently innovated.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Complex foraging behaviours in wild birds emerge from social learning and recombination of components.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
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
Human cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) is recognized as a powerful ecological and evolutionary force, but its origins are poorly understood. The long-standing view that CCE requires specialized social learning processes such as teaching has recently come under question, and cannot explain why such processes evolved in the first place. An alternative, but largely untested, hypothesis is that these processes gradually coevolved with an increasing reliance on complex tools. To address this, we used large-scale transmission chain experiments (624 participants), to examine the role of different learning processes in generating cumulative improvements in two tool types of differing complexity. Both tool types increased in efficacy across experimental generations, but teaching only provided an advantage for the more complex tools. Moreover, while the simple tools tended to converge on a common design, the more complex tools maintained a diversity of designs. These findings indicate that the emergence of cumulative culture is not strictly dependent on, but may generate selection for, teaching. As reliance on increasingly complex tools grew, so too would selection for teaching, facilitating the increasingly open-ended evolution of cultural artefacts.
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