The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence

Abstract

Various studies have investigated cognitive mechanisms underlying culture in humans and other great apes. However, the adaptive reasons for the evolution of uniquely sophisticated cumulative culture in our species remain unclear. We propose that the cultural capabilities of humans are the evolutionary result of a stepwise transition from the ape-like lifestyle of earlier hominins to the foraging niche still observed in extant hunter–gatherers. Recent ethnographic, archaeological and genetic studies have provided compelling evidence that the components of the foraging niche (social egalitarianism, sexual and social division of labour, extensive co-residence and cooperation with unrelated individuals, multilocality, fluid sociality and high between-camp mobility) engendered a unique multilevel social structure where the cognitive mechanisms underlying cultural evolution (high-fidelity transmission, innovation, teaching, recombination, ratcheting) evolved as adaptations. Therefore, multilevel sociality underlies a ‘social ratchet’ or irreversible task specialization splitting the burden of cultural knowledge across individuals, which may explain why human collective intelligence is uniquely able to produce sophisticated cumulative culture. The foraging niche perspective may explain why a complex gene-culture dual inheritance system evolved uniquely in humans and interprets the cultural, morphological and genetic origins of Homo sapiens as a process of recombination of innovations appearing in differentiated but interconnected populations. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines

“…Further work, however, has provided evidence that this is an over-simplification, because the strongest effects occur in population networks composed of sub-groups in separate neighbourhoods, while being partially or intermittently connected [ 98 , 99 , 108 – 110 ]. As noted in the section above, these findings concur well with those arising from recent studies among real-world HG social networks [ 93 , 94 , 96 , 97 , 100 ].…”

“…The artefacts provide us with a progressively more detailed record of the evolution of human material culture, but limited inferences can be drawn about social matters such as collective action and knowledge. By contrast, rich data on the latter come from the study of present-day peoples dependent on the hunting and gathering (HG) ways of life that the archaeological material tells us characterized millennia of our species' recent history [ 93 ]. However, the cultures of these communities tend to be very stable, revealing little of evolutionary change, whereas change permeates the archaeological record of the last few million years.…”

“…Based on ethnographic, archaeological and genetic evidence, Migliano & Vinicius [ 93 ] propose that the evolutionary transition from an ape-like to a hunter–gatherer foraging niche engendered a unique social network structure facilitating CCE. They define this concept as a ‘social ratcheting’ that generates irreversible task specialization and division of labour uniquely found in humans, as the main adaptive consequence of human multilevel sociality.…”

“…This accumulated culture can then be used to augment the evolutionary processes used to discover new robots, specifically by accelerating the learning mechanisms that are needed to fine-tune the controllers of new body plans. This may facilitate evolvability on more macroscopic scales, echoing such effects in the hunter–gatherer [ 93 ] and laboratory experimental contexts [ 99 ].…”

Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees

“…The findings of the first study demonstrated how a shared innovation may arise through two sequential manifestations of collective phenomena: first, the combination of different chimpanzees' exploratory actions, coupled with observational learning, to create a novel technology (LBT usage); and second, social learning by others from this, so collective knowledge of it becomes shared across a group [ 27 ]. We can summarize this in the conclusion that collective knowledge can be both an important cause and a consequence in the emergence of cumulative culture as in the human case [ 75 ]. As we noted above, this conclusion is based on a serendipitous set of observations, contrasting with many other reports of a lack of cumulative cultural change in chimpanzee social learning experiments [ 43 , 45 , 47 ].…”