Henrich, Heyes and Tomasello on the cognitive foundations of cultural evolution

Abstract

We give a brief overview of three accounts of the cognitive abilities that facilitated the emergence and transmission of cumulative culture in the recent hominin lineage. These accounts were developed by Joseph Henrich (e.g. 2016), Cecilia Heyes (e.g. 2018), and Michael Tomasello (e.g. 1999, 2008, 2014) in collaboration with others. We pay particular attention to the different abilities that these authors think are foundational to human cultural evolution, and to questions about whether these abilities first arose as products of genetic or cultural evolution. Our hope is that by clarifying the similarities and differences between these projects, we will identify points of disagreement that could tested empirically, and areas where further conceptual clarification is required.

Flexible Cultural Learning Through Action Coordination

“…The importance of attention in cultural learning is well established. Opportunities for social learning are proposed to be preferentially attended (Heyes, 2012), and the ability to share attention and follow where conspecifics are looking has been proposed as one of the foundational cognitive abilities driving human cultural evolution (Heyes & Moore, 2023; Tomasello et al, 2005). Furthermore, direct gaze is one of several ostensive cues proposed as key to infant cultural learning by natural pedagogy (Csibra & Gergely, 2009), as it allows infants to detect when adults are demonstrating something for them to learn.…”