ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence.
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 27 papers.
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27 citing papers in PubMed, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Major transitions in sociocultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Back(s) to basics: The concept of backing in stone tool technologies for tracing hominins' technical innovations.Evolutionary anthropology · 2024Review
- Musical instruments, tools, language and genetic data reveal ancient hunter-gatherer networks.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- The human side of biodiversity: coevolution of the human niche, palaeo-synanthropy and ecosystem complexity in the deep human past.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Physiography, foraging mobility, and the first peopling of Sahul.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Evidence for vocal signatures and voice-prints in a wild parrot.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Agta hunter-gatherer oral microbiomes are shaped by contact network structure.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Modularity of food-sharing networks minimises the risk for individual and group starvation in hunter-gatherer societies.PloS one · 2023Article
- Problem-solving in groups of common marmosets (PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Experiments in artificial culture: from noisy imitation to storytelling robots.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
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2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Various studies have investigated cognitive mechanisms underlying culture in humans and other great apes. However, the adaptive reasons for the evolution of uniquely sophisticated cumulative culture in our species remain unclear. We propose that the cultural capabilities of humans are the evolutionary result of a stepwise transition from the ape-like lifestyle of earlier hominins to the foraging niche still observed in extant hunter-gatherers. Recent ethnographic, archaeological and genetic studies have provided compelling evidence that the components of the foraging niche (social egalitarianism, sexual and social division of labour, extensive co-residence and cooperation with unrelated individuals, multilocality, fluid sociality and high between-camp mobility) engendered a unique multilevel social structure where the cognitive mechanisms underlying cultural evolution (high-fidelity transmission, innovation, teaching, recombination, ratcheting) evolved as adaptations. Therefore, multilevel sociality underlies a 'social ratchet' or irreversible task specialization splitting the burden of cultural knowledge across individuals, which may explain why human collective intelligence is uniquely able to produce sophisticated cumulative culture. The foraging niche perspective may explain why a complex gene-culture dual inheritance system evolved uniquely in humans and interprets the cultural, morphological and genetic origins of
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