Culture: The Driving Force of Human Cognition

Abstract

It is often, though sometimes only implicitly, assumed that biological/genetic evolution sets neural substrates, that neural substrates fix cognitive abilities, and that cognitive abilities determine the spectrum of cultural practices exhibited by a biological species. We label this view as the "bottom-up-only" view. In this paper we will show that such a "chain of dependence" is much looser than usually assumed, especially as far as recent periods (the last 800,000 years vs. the last 7 million years or more) are considered. We will provide evidence and arguments supporting the idea that cultural innovation may have direct and ascertainable effects both on the cognitive capabilities of populations of hominins (via what we call "cultural exaptation") and on the neural substrates of the individuals in those populations (via what we call "cultural neural reuse"). Together, cultural exaptation and cultural neural reuse may give raise to a plausible general mechanism for cognitive evolution in which culture is the driving force, thus offering a "top-down-also" view of human evolution.

Afterword: Tough Questions; Hard Problems; Incremental Progress

“…They argue against the idea that individual cognitive capacity, insofar as it is constrained by genetic factors, holds cultural complexity on a tight leash. They reject the idea that major changes in cultural complexity are signals of genetically evolved changes in individual capacity (Colagè & d'Errico, ). If that were true, we would expect visible advances in cultural complexity—increases in social scale, the appearance of major new technologies like the control of fire or composite tools, or new social technologies like material symbols—to have relatively determinate and discrete points of origin in space, time and taxon, as genetic changes do.…”

What Early Sapiens Cognition Can Teach Us: Untangling Cultural Influences on Human Cognition Across Time

“…Even in hindsight, these achievements strike us as truly impressive, yet what made them possible has remained one of the most tantalizing questions of human evolution. Among paleoscientists, there is increasing consensus that most, if not all, important innovations made by Homo sapiens were brought about by evolutionary mechanisms in which culture was the major driving force (for more details and examples, see Colagè and d'Errico, 2018;Bender, 2019;Sterelny, 2019). One such mechanism is the cultural transmission and accumulation of knowledge, ideas, and inventions, which generates the "ratchet effect" so characteristic of human culture (Tennie et al, 2009;Henrich, 2016).…”

“…The delineation of basic aspects of cognition is aided by insights from a wide range of disciplines including evolutionary anthropology and paleoanthropology, archeology, comparative psychology, and language evolution. This research helps to identify the set of social and cognitive skills that is uniquely human (Haun et al, 2010;Tomasello and Herrmann, 2010), the evolutionary mechanisms that enabled them, such as cumulative culture and cultural exaptation (Tennie et al, 2009;Colagè and d'Errico, 2018;Heyes, 2018), and characteristics of those processes and constraints that continue to shape cognitive tools and skills (Christiansen and Chater, 2008;Lupyan and Dale, 2016). The classic example of a cultural innovation with a profound impact on cognition is literacy.…”

The Cultural Evolution of Human Nature

“…But beyond the story of human origins, this approach holds the exciting prospect for both psychology and anthropology that future investigation may be based neither on attempting to work out which human characteristics are 'hard-wired', and which are not, nor even on simply estimating the contribution made to characteristics by various forms of inheritance, but on the broader evolutionary stability, trajectory and interaction of both psychological mechanisms and the cultural practices which sustain and result from them. While it will remain important to investigate the role of various forms of inheritance in ontogeny, this approach suggests that, as with developments in epigenetics, the lines between phylogeny and ontogeny may soon begin to blur (Colagè and d'Errico 2018).…”