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Demography and cultural complexity

  • The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition
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Abstract

This paper begins by calling attention to a puzzling feature of our deep past: an apparent mis-match between morphological evolution in our lineage, including the expansion of our brain and neocortex, and changes in material culture. Three ideas might explain this mis-match. (a) The apparent mis-match is an illusion: change in material culture is indeed driven by biological evolution, but of a kind difficult to identify in the fossil record; (b) the mismatch is caused by the fact that material culture is sensitive to the social and demographic environment, not just the native cognitive capacities of individual agents. Innovation and its uptake is more reliable in larger social worlds. (c) The mis-match is made possible by adaptive phenotypic plasticity; in particular, cognitive plasticity. Just as material culture evolves through cumulative cultural learning, so too do cognitive skills, including ones which make innovations in, and the transmission of, material culture more efficient. This paper is targeted on the second of these ideas, and distinguishes three different versions of the view that increases in social scale support increases in the complexity of material culture. Those are: (i) cultural selection is more efficient in larger social worlds; (ii) larger social worlds support more specialisation, which in turn supports a more complex material culture; (iii) cultural learning is more efficient in larger social worlds. The paper argues that the first two of these pathways are probably more important than the third in explaining otherwise puzzling features of the archaeological and ethnographic record.

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Notes

  1. A note on terminology. “Hominin” refers to all members of the lineage to which we belong, and which begins with the split between the lineage leading to the chimp species, and that with sapiens as its only living taxon. As do many others, I use ‘human” as an informal term for the recent, exceptionally large-brained hominins.

  2. Stone tool making is inevitably the centre of these discussions, in part for reasons of preservation, but also because it pose unique and difficult technical challenges (Hiscock 2014), and because these tools open up access to new resources and lifeways. Even simple flakes can cut through rhino hide (Schick and Toth 1993); good luck trying to chew through such hide with hominin teeth and claws.

  3. A possible exception is a link between the origins of our species and the inception of "Middle Stone Age", prepared-core technologies in Africa. This match depends on both taking the recent finds at Jebel Irhoud to represent the origins of Homo sapiens, and the site of Olorgesailie to represent the onset of the Middle Stone Age (see Deino et al. 2018). But even if this correlation proves robust (and there are claims of earlier prepared core techniques) the prepared core techniques characteristic of the MSA were not confined to sapiens populations; Neanderthals adopted these techniques too.

  4. These were found in the Iberian Peninsula and Southern France, dating to the Upper Palaeolithic, after the last glacial maximum (perhaps 21–18 kya). For some striking images, see http://www.lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/2008januarysolutreanpage1.htm.

  5. Not all composite tools will be interdependent this way: it is quite likely that an arrow or spear hafted with multiple microliths will still penetrate if one of them breaks or breaks off.

  6. See (Andersson and Read 2016) for a clear and insightful exposition and discussion of the structure of this model.

  7. This the most favourable possible organisation of social learning, and one of the points of the analysis is to show that even in this most favourable situation, skills decay.

  8. As one of the referees pointed out, we might expect conformist learning to replace pay-off based learning if and to the extent that the characteristics of an artifact come to be a social signal of identity and inclusion. If and as that happens, a functionally superior variant might risk disapproval or even ostracism. On this view, we would predict quite different trajectories for "style-like" features of artifacts, and this mechanism has been suggested as part of the explanation of the stasis of the Acheulian.

  9. Connoisseurs of the literature will recognise this as a version of Mueller’s explanation of the existence of sexual reproduction: combining in the one genome distinct copies of an allele counteracts the effects of mutational load, which would otherwise gradually erode the capacity of gene packages to adaptively direct development if they were transmitted asexually from one generation to next.

  10. It is possible that the loss of those tools had an environmental rather than a demographic cause. In the Little Ice Age an increase in pack ice may have cut them off from driftwood.

  11. Nets were big ticket items in some aboriginal economies, and were used to capture small and medium game as well (Satterthwait 1987).

  12. So for example in Derex’s experiments, novices could see only one demonstration per time period and each demonstration lasted 40s, independently of the skill demonstrated. While regimentation of this kind is clearly necessary for experimental control, equally clearly it detracts from the realism of the experimental runs.

  13. There is of course expertise in the use of language, and one which might guide novices in their choice of experts: think of oratory, rhetoric, capacities to persuade and entertain. But not with respect to phoneme inventories or vocabulary items.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Hiscock, Anton Killin, Steve Kuhn (especially), Ross Pain, Ron Planer, and Ceri Shipton for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, an to two referees for constructive and informed feedback. Thanks also to the audiences at the AAP (Wollongong 2019), The Konrad Lorenz Institute and the Archaeology meets Philosophy Workshop (ANU, 2019) for their feedback. As always, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the Australian Research Council (Grant No. FL130 100 141) for their generous support of my work on human evolution.

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    Kim Sterelny

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Sterelny, K. Demography and cultural complexity. Synthese 198, 8557–8580 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02587-2

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