Cultural Evolutionary Tipping Points in the Storage and Transmission of Information

Abstract

Human culture has evolved through a series of major tipping points in information storage and communication. The first was the appearance of language, which enabled communication between brains and allowed humans to specialize in what they do and to participate in complex mating games. The second was information storage outside the brain, most obviously expressed in the “Upper Paleolithic Revolution” – the sudden proliferation of cave art, personal adornment, and ritual in Europe some 35,000–45,000 years ago. More recently, this storage has taken the form of writing, mass media, and now the Internet, which is arguably overwhelming humans’ ability to discern relevant information. The third tipping point was the appearance of technology capable of accumulating and manipulating vast amounts of information outside humans, thus removing them as bottlenecks to a seemingly self-perpetuating process of knowledge explosion. Important components of any discussion of cultural evolutionary tipping points are tempo and mode, given that the rate of change, as well as the kind of change, in information storage and transmission has not been constant over the previous million years.

Knowing, Learning and Teaching—How Homo Became Docens

“…Others have focused on related areas like learning and environmental adaptation (Shennan & Steel 1999), human ecology, information storage and cultural learning (Bentley & O´Brien 2013;Henrich 2004), evolution of modern thinking and increased working memory (Coolidge & Wynn 2009), the emergence of the social brain (Dunbar 1998;Gowlett et al 2012), co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language (Morgan et al 2015), human evolution in the light of extant non-human tool users (Whiten et al 2009), neuroarchaeology and cognition (Stout et al 2015;Stout & Khreisheh, this issue), the successive development of a uniquely long period of human childhood, allowing imaginary play to expand (Nielsen 2011;Nowell 2010; this issue), stone tools and the evolution of human cognition (Nowell & Davidson 2010), to mention a few of many areas (for overview, see e.g. Beaune et al 2009;Renfrew et al 2009).…”

The Encultured Primate: Thresholds and Transitions in Hominin Cultural Evolution

“…Since the invention of writing the speed of cultural evolution has further increased as a result of other technological breakthroughs like the art of printing, stenciling and photocopying and, more recently, the advent of social media and the world wide web. According to Bentley and O'Brien the appearance of technology capable of accumulating and manipulating vast amounts of cultural information outside human brains has removed us as bottlenecks altogether, resulting in a seemingly self-perpetuating process of knowledge explosion [60].…”

Major transitions in information technology

“…transistors replaced vacuum tubes because they were faster, easier to manufacture, consumed less energy and needed less maintenance [40]. The sequence of successive innovations can be described with the classic adoption curve [9,41], where the probability of adopting the technology at time t is…”

“…Using the concept of 'tipping points' [8] as a framework, Bentley & O'Brien [9] defined three major thresholds in the evolution of information storage and communication: the appearance of language, the capacity to store information outside humans and the appearance of technology able to amplify information processing far beyond our biological limitations.…”