Original title: What is cumulative cultural evolution?
Cumulative cultural evolutionA process in which behaviors or skills build on earlier versions as they are passed between individuals or generations. means that behaviors or skills build up across generations, rather than being copied unchanged. Researchers disagree about whether non-human animals show it, partly because they use different definitions. This review lays out core criteria that may apply to animals, plus extended criteria seen in humans so far. It urges researchers to say clearly which parts they have tested.
Imagine a family passing down a recipe. Each cook can copy it, but the recipe only grows if someone preserves a useful change and a later cook builds on it. In this paper, the recipe’s growing improvements stand for cumulative culture, and the review sets out what researchers should check before saying that process is happening.
The answer affects how researchers compare human culture with animal behavior, and how they explain the variety and complexity of human ways of life. Clearer criteria can make claims about cultural abilities easier to test and compare.
The abstract describes a review and proposed criteria, not a test of whether any particular non-human species meets them. It says the extended criteria have not, to date, been observed in other species; it does not establish that they never occur there.
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What is cumulative cultural evolution? — Alex Mesoudi, Alex Thornton — Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences — doi:10.1098/rspb.2018.0712
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.