Lecture | Andrew Buskell | Kinds of Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Andrew Buskell | Public Policy | Georgia Institute of Techonology

The 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. Looking at the margin reveals some surprises. One recent result suggests that Guinea baboons (Papio papio) display characteristic features of CCE in laboratory environments. This is surprising given the lack of anecdotal evidence about baboon culture in the wild, and how such a claim would force a revision in current narratives about the hominin cognitive evolution. I’ll be suggesting that these claims have some truth to them—but don’t carry any radical implications. To show this, I’ll be distinguishing between three kinds of cumulative cultural change: (i) socially scaffolded task optimization, (ii) domain parsing and organization, and (iii) technological recombination and affordance matching. Using these distinctions, I argue the work on Guinea baboons is meant to show their capacity for domain parsing. Yet I’ll also be arguing that the evidence is much more indicative of the less cognitively demanding socially scaffolded task optimization.