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Hunter-Gatherers and Neo-Darwinian Cultural Transmission

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Hunter-Gatherers

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Abstract

Cultural transmission theory—sometimes called dual inheritance theory—is the focus of this chapter. The neo-Darwinian models presented here treat cultural transmission and reproduction as extrasomatic rather than simple biological analogs. This leads to predictions about behavior that differ fundamentally from those that follow from the genetic model upon which classic evolutionary ecological analyses rest, but that in many ways better account for behaviors that distinguish humans from other organisms (e.g., altruism, cooperation).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Biased cultural transmission (direct or indirect) is “biased” in two senses. First, the individual receiving cultural information is biased in favor of some information (e.g., traits) and against others. Second, biased transmission results in a cultural population that, following cultural transmission, is a biased sample of the cultural population before transmission.

  2. 2.

    Too little is presently known about other contemporaneous species/sub-species H. floresiensis (Brown et al. 2004) and the Denisovans (Reich et al. 2010) to determine their role in the Upper Paleolithic transition.

  3. 3.

    Following Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981), Hewlett and Cavalli-Sforza (1986) infer that the effect of this “horizontal” transmission process is conservative (horizontal here refers to cultural transmission via lines that are other than parental or vertical). That is because in Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman’s model of cultural transmission, horizontal transmission results in cultural blending (see previous discussion, this chapter) that minimizes the impact of innovations. When it is assumed that biases (direct or indirect) are involved in horizontal transmission, the result is the opposite: Access to a greater number of potential models increases the chance that a favorable innovation will be observed and adopted.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Robert L. Bettinger

  2. Department of Anthropology, Univeristy of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Raven Garvey

  3. Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

    Shannon Tushingham

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  1. Robert L. Bettinger
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  2. Raven Garvey
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Correspondence to Robert L. Bettinger .

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Bettinger, R., Garvey, R., Tushingham, S. (2015). Hunter-Gatherers and Neo-Darwinian Cultural Transmission. In: Hunter-Gatherers. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7581-2_8

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