ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
When does cultural evolution become cumulative culture? A case study of humpback whale song.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Assessing the Role of Vocal Plasticity in Sociospatial Coordination.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Humpback whale song complexity and evolution on a northwestern Pacific breeding ground: Okinawa, Japan.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Cumulative cultural evolution and mechanisms for cultural selection in wild bird songs.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Song complexity is maintained during inter-population cultural transmission of humpback whale songs.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations.Science advances · 2022Article
- Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- When does cultural evolution become cumulative culture? A case study of humpback whale song.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Collective minds: social network topology shapes collective cognition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Evidence for cumulative cultural evolution in bird song.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Population turnover, behavioral conservatism, and rates of cultural evolution.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Culture presents a second inheritance system by which innovations can be transmitted between generations and among individuals. Some vocal behaviours present compelling examples of cultural evolution. Where modifications accumulate over time, such a process can become cumulative cultural evolution. The existence of cumulative cultural evolution in non-human animals is controversial. When physical products of such a process do not exist, modifications may not be clearly visible over time. Here, we investigate whether the constantly evolving songs of humpback whales (
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