Hunter-Gatherer Inter-Band Interaction Rates: Implications for Cumulative Culture

Hill, Kim; Wood, Brian M.; Baggio, Jacopo A.; Hurtado, Ana; Boyd, Robert

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102806

Cited by 250 publications

(189 citation statements)

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“…Note the difference between the interactions of Band 1, a more reclusive group in which two persons had committed homicide, and Band 2, a very peaceful and sociable group. These spheres of interaction are similar to those found for the Hadza and Ache foragers (48).…”

Section: Like Night and Daysupporting

confidence: 85%

“…The cultural institutions used for the focus of the analysis will not be unique to the Ju/'hoan Bushmen but those that are widely shared by other known foraging groups. These institutions include egalitarian relations (38), kinship systems and dues (39,40), meat sharing (41), marriage and bride service (42,43), land rights (44)(45)(46), networks cross-cutting groups (47,48), and shared cosmology and ritual to heal individuals and community (49)(50)(51).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Wiessner

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

286

181

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Much attention has been focused on control of fire in human evolution and the impact of cooking on anatomy, social, and residential arrangements. However, little is known about what transpired when firelight extended the day, creating effective time for social activities that did not conflict with productive time for subsistence activities. Comparison of 174 day and nighttime conversations among the Ju/'hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of southern Africa, supplemented by 68 translated texts, suggests that day talk centers on economic matters and gossip to regulate social relations. Night activities steer away from tensions of the day to singing, dancing, religious ceremonies, and enthralling stories, often about known people. Such stories describe the workings of entire institutions in a small-scale society with little formal teaching. Night talk plays an important role in evoking higher orders of theory of mind via the imagination, conveying attributes of people in broad networks (virtual communities), and transmitting the "big picture" of cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior, cooperation, and trust at the regional level. Findings from the Ju/'hoan are compared with other hunter-gatherer societies and related to the widespread human use of firelight for intimate conversation and our appetite for evening stories. The question is raised as to what happens when economically unproductive firelit time is turned to productive time by artificial lighting.Our old people long ago had a government, and it was an ember from the fire where we last lived which we used to light the fire at the new place we were going. . . Di//xao = Oma, 1998 (1) C ontrol of fire had an enormous impact on the life of our hominin ancestors. As Wrangham and Carmody have so cogently argued, the use of fire for cooking greatly increased the digestibility of food and effective provisioning of young, allowing for shorter birth intervals (2-4). Fire altered anatomy, particularly brain size and gut volume, and radically reduced chewing time. Fire protected early humans from predators and provided a new context for social interaction when food was brought to a central site for cooking. Modified landscapes after burning (5) and higher caloric returns from cooked foods lowered the costs of foraged foods, and thus the costs of sharing. Finally, artificial firelight altered circadian rhythms and extended the day (6), freeing time for social interaction that did not conflict with time for subsistence work.Current archaeological evidence indicates that our ancestors had sporadic control of fire by 1 million y ago or longer (7,8) and regular use after approximately 400,000 ka (9). With or following the control of fire, many developments were unfolding that rendered modern humans "unique" (10): extended cooperative breeding (11-13), higher orders of theory of mind (14, 15), religion (16), language (17, 18), social learning and cultural transmission (19,20), cultural institutions and their regulation (21,22), and intergroup cooperation and exchange (...

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Section: Like Night and Daysupporting

confidence: 85%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Wiessner

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

286

181

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“…In particular, theoretical work could investigate the effect of variation in the properties of the fitness landscape; population structure; and structure of cultural learning, such as payoffbiased learning, conformism, and accessibility of cultural models. Recent research indicates that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies display a unique social structure involving extensive interactions between people living in different residential groups (34,35). This population structure may constrain information dissemination and promote exploration of the design space.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partial connectivity increases cultural accumulation within groups

Derex

Boyd

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

239

273

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Complex technologies used in most human societies are beyond the inventive capacities of individuals. Instead, they result from a cumulative process in which innovations are gradually added to existing cultural traits across many generations. Recent work suggests that a population's ability to develop complex technologies is positively affected by its size and connectedness. Here, we present a simple computer-based experiment that compares the accumulation of innovations by fully and partially connected groups of the same size in a complex fitness landscape. We find that the propensity to learn from successful individuals drastically reduces cultural diversity within fully connected groups. In comparison, partially connected groups produce more diverse solutions, and this diversity allows them to develop complex solutions that are never produced in fully connected groups. These results suggest that explanations of ancestral patterns of cultural complexity may need to consider levels of population fragmentation and interaction patterns between partially isolated groups. cultural evolution | innovation | population size | social network | technological trajectory P eople everywhere rely on technology for their survival (1). In even the simplest foraging societies, essential tools are beyond the inventive capacities of individuals; they result from a cumulative process by which innovations are gradually added to existing cultural traits across many generations (2). Recent work suggests that a population's ability to develop complex technologies is positively affected by its size and connectedness (3-5). Large interaction networks allow individuals to learn from many others, and theory predicts that increased opportunities to learn socially reduces the rate of cultural loss and increases the rate at which people improve existing cultural traits. This prediction is supported by evidence from both field and laboratory studies (5-10). However, some authors have been reluctant to embrace this idea, pointing out discrepancies between measures of population size and observed cultural complexity (11)(12)(13)(14). It seems likely that factors other than social network size affect the evolution of cultural complexity, and these factors may obscure the effect of the population size under some conditions.One possibility is that social network structure matters as well. Economists have recently investigated how levels of connectedness in networks affect a group's ability to solve problems of varying complexity (15,16). In agreement with previous work in cultural evolution, they found that high levels of connectivity help groups to solve simple tasks. However, they also suggest that wellconnected networks perform poorly at solving complex tasks (15,16). The complexity of a problem can be represented by mapping all possible solutions onto a measure of performance, which results in what has been called a fitness landscape (17). Simple problems are associated with smooth landscapes, each with a unique optimum that will be reached b...

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“…The foraging niche is skill-intensive and often requires intense cooperation. The skills are socially transmitted and shaped by cumulative cultural evolution (Dean et al, 2014;Hill et al, 2014), and it takes women until their midtwenties, and men even longer, to become fully efficient foragers. The social structure and networks of hunter-gatherers in fact appears to optimize efficient transmission of cultural knowledge.…”

Section: Hunter-gatherers: the Evolutionary Context Of The Emergence mentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Insights From Non-human Primates

2018

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The aim of this contribution is to explore the origins of moral behavior and its underlying moral preferences and intuitions from an evolutionary perspective. Such a perspective encompasses both the ultimate, adaptive function of morality in our own species, as well as the phylogenetic distribution of morality and its key elements across primates. First, with regard to the ultimate function, we argue that human moral preferences are best construed as adaptations to the affordances of the fundamentally interdependent hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our hominin ancestors. Second, with regard to the phylogenetic origin, we show that even though full-blown human morality is unique to humans, several of its key elements are not. Furthermore, a review of evidence from non-human primates regarding prosocial concern, conformity, and the potential presence of universal, biologically anchored and arbitrary cultural norms shows that these elements of morality are not distributed evenly across primate species. This suggests that they have evolved along separate evolutionary trajectories. In particular, the element of prosocial concern most likely evolved in the context of shared infant care, which can be found in humans and some New World monkeys. Strikingly, many if not all of the elements of morality found in non-human primates are only evident in individualistic or dyadic contexts, but not as third-party reactions by truly uninvolved bystanders. We discuss several potential explanations for the unique presence of a systematic third-party perspective in humans, but focus particularly on mentalizing ability and language. Whereas both play an important role in present day, full-blown human morality, it appears unlikely that they played a causal role for the original emergence of morality. Rather, we suggest that the most plausible scenario to date is that human morality emerged because our hominin ancestors, equipped on the one hand with large and powerful brains inherited from their ape-like ancestor, and on the other hand with strong prosocial concern as a result of cooperative breeding, could evolve into an ever more interdependent social niche.

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Hunter-Gatherer Inter-Band Interaction Rates: Implications for Cumulative Culture

Cited by 250 publications

References 19 publications

Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen

Partial connectivity increases cultural accumulation within groups

Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Insights From Non-human Primates

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