Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Andrew Buskell | Public Policy | Georgia Institute of TechonologyThe current consensus in cultural evolution is that cumulative cultural evolution (“CCE”) set hominins apart: capacities for CCE are distinctive to hominins and help explain their geographic spread and evolutionary success. CCE is an intuitive idea: cultural traits are modified upon over time as they are learned by others—and these modifications can generate traditions of extraordinary complexity, adaptiveness, and economy. Yet this intuitive idea has been remarkably hard to operationalize and define. A key reason for is that work on CCE is “lumped”, adopting a general and coarse-grained analysis of phenomena. It is lumped because researchers focus on explaining paradigmatic cases of cumulative cultural change—notably, the technologies and skills of Holocene-era hominins. But to understand the role of CCE in explaining hominin evolution, one needs to look at the margins of the concept’s applicability in early hominins and non-human animals. Look