ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Cultural transmission among hunter-gatherers.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Parental perspectives on children's social learning in four cultures.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Technological complexity and combinatorial invention in small-scale societies.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies.Nature communications · 2025Article
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires.Open research Europe · 2025Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We examine from whom children learn in mobile hunter-gatherers, a way of life that characterized much of human history. Recent studies on the modes of transmission in hunter-gatherers are reviewed before presenting an analysis of five modes of transmission described by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman [L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, M. W. Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach (1981)] but not previously evaluated in hunter-gatherer research. We also present two modes of group transmission, conformist transmission, and concerted transmission, seldom mentioned in hunter-gatherer social learning research, and propose a unique mode of group transmission called cumulative transmission. The analysis of the additional modes of transmission indicated that cultural evolutionary signatures of vertical transmission, such as the conservation of cultural traits, have been underestimated because previous studies have seldom considered remote generations or distinguished intrafamilial from extrafamilial horizontal and oblique transmission. However, field data also indicate that hunter-gatherer children interacted with and learned from many nongenetically related individuals; about half of children's and adolescents' horizontal and oblique social learning came from nongenetically related individuals. Intimate living conditions of hunter-gatherers provide opportunities for group transmission, and ethnographic evidence presented demonstrates that at least three types of group transmission exist. All three forms of group transmission theoretically contribute to the conservation of culture, homogeneity of intracultural diversity, and high intercultural diversity. Analysis of additional modes of oblique and horizontal transmission and discussion of previous and unique modes of group transmission demonstrate the various mechanisms by which hunter-gatherer children learn and how cultures are conserved and contribute to cumulative culture.
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