ArticleNature communications2022
Cumulative cultural evolution and mechanisms for cultural selection in wild bird songs.
Article in Nature communications, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Remarkably High Repeat Content in the Genomes of Sparrows: The Importance of Genome Assembly Completeness for Transposable Element Discovery.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Norm reinforcement, not conformity or environmental factors, is predicted to sustain cultural variation.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Cumulative cultural evolution and mechanisms for cultural selection in wild bird songs.Nature communications · 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
8 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cumulative cultural evolution, the accumulation of sequential changes within a single socially learned behaviour that results in improved function, is prominent in humans and has been documented in experimental studies of captive animals and managed wild populations. Here, we provide evidence that cumulative cultural evolution has occurred in the learned songs of Savannah sparrows. In a first step, "click trains" replaced "high note clusters" over a period of three decades. We use mathematical modelling to show that this replacement is consistent with the action of selection, rather than drift or frequency-dependent bias. Generations later, young birds elaborated the "click train" song form by adding more clicks. We show that the new songs with more clicks elicit stronger behavioural responses from both males and females. Therefore, we suggest that a combination of social learning, innovation, and sexual selection favoring a specific discrete trait was followed by directional sexual selection that resulted in naturally occurring cumulative cultural evolution in the songs of this wild animal population.
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