Culture Evolves

Andrew Whiten is Director of the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution at the University of St Andrews and Director of the University's 'Living Links to Human Evolution' Research Centre in Edinburgh Zoo. His research interests are broadly in the evolution and development of social cognition, with a particular recent focus on social learning, tradition and culture in humans and in non-human primates. Robert A. Hinde is formerly Royal Society Research Professor and Master, St. John's College, Cambridge, UK. Kevin N Laland received his PhD from University College London in 1990 and is currently Professor of Biology at the University of St Andrews. His research employs both experimental and theoretical methods to investigate a range of topics related to animal (including human) behaviour and evolution, particularly niche construction, social learning, and gene-culture co-evolution. He is the author of over 170 scientific articles and 8 books. Professor Chris Stringer has worked at the Natural History Museum since 1973, and is now Research Leader in Human Origins and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His early research concentrated on the relationship of Neanderthals and early modern humans in Europe, but through his work on the 'Out of Africa' theory of modern human origins, he now collaborates with archaeologists, dating specialists and geneticists in attempting to reconstruct the evolution of modern humans globally. His recent books include The Complete World of Human Evolution (2005, with Peter Andrews), and Homo britannicus (2006), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Prize. He has excavated at sites in Britain, Gibraltar, Morocco and Turkey, and is currently leading the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project in its third phase (AHOB3), which began in October 2009, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. AHOB is a major collaborative project to reconstruct the pattern of the earliest human colonisations of Britain and Europe.

Introduction ; Exploring the costs and benefits of social information use: an appraisal of current experimental evidence ; From fish to fashion: experimental and theoretical insights into the evolution of culture ; Social learning in birds and its role in shaping a foraging nice ; Social learning and the development of individual and group behaviour in mammal societies ; Social traditions and social learning in capuchin monkeys (Cebus) ; The scope of culture in chimpanzees, humans, and ancestral apes ; Social learning and evolution: the cultural intelligence hypothesis ; The evolution of primate general and cultural intelligence ; The origins of stone tool technology in Africa: a historical perspective ; Culture and cognition in the Acheulian industry: a case study from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov ; Stone toolmaking and the evolution of human culture and cognition ; Evolution, revolution or saltation scenario for the emergence of modern cultures ; Descent with modification and the archaeological record ; The evolution of the diversity of cultures ; Language evolution and human history: what a difference a date makes ; How do we use language? Shared patters in the frequency of word use across 17 world languages ; Mode and tempo in the evolution of socio-political organization: reconciling 'Darwinian' and 'Spencerian' evolutionary approaches in anthropology ; How copying affects the amount, evenness, and persistence of cultural knowledge: insights from the social learning strategies tournament ; What drives the evolution of hunter gatherer subsistence technology? A reanalysis of the risk hypothesis with data from the Pacific Northwest ; On the nature of cultural transmission networks: evidence from Fijian villages for adaptive learning biases ; Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation ; The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture ; Social learning among Congo Basin hunter-gathers ; Young children's selective trust in informants