Demography and Cultural Innovation: a Model and its Implications for the Emergence of Modern Human Culture

TLDR

Recent research has focused on analogies between genetic and cultural transmission to better understand how culture changes over time. The study aims to use computer simulation to examine how demography influences cultural innovation within an evolutionary framework. The authors employ a computer simulation model that links population size and contact range to rates of cultural innovation. The model shows that innovation is more successful in larger populations, implying that demographic growth and expanded contact, rather than genetic mutations, likely drove modern human cultural emergence and may broadly explain cultural evolution across human history.

Abstract

In recent years there has been a major growth of interest in exploring the analogies between the genetic transmission of information from one generation to the next and the processes of cultural transmission, in an attempt to obtain a greater understanding of how culture change occurs. This article uses computer simulation to explore the implications of a specific model of the relationship between demography and innovation within an evolutionary framework. The consequences of innovation appear far more successful in larger populations than in smaller ones. In conclusion, it is suggested that the model has major implications for the origins of modern human culture in the last 50,000 years, which may be seen not as the result of genetic mutations leading to improved cognitive capacities of individuals, but as a population consequence of the demographic growth and increased contact range which are evident at this time. It is also proposed that the model may be of general relevance for understanding the process of cultural evolution in modern and pre-modern humans.