Abstract
Culture is increasingly being framed as a driver of human phenotypes and behaviour. Yet very little is known about variations in the patterns of past social interactions between humans in cultural evolution. The archaeological record, combined with modern evolutionary and analytical approaches, provides a unique opportunity to investigate broad-scale patterns of cultural change. Prompted by evidence that a population's social connectivity influences cultural variability, in this article, we revisit traditional approaches used to infer cultural evolutionary processes from the archaeological data. We then propose that frameworks considering multi-scalar interactions (from individuals to populations) over time and space have the potential to advance knowledge in cultural evolutionary theory. We describe how social network analysis can be applied to analyse diachronic structural changes and test cultural transmission hypotheses using the archaeological record (here specifically from the Marine Isotope Stage 3 ca 57–29 ka onwards). We argue that the reconstruction of prehistoric networks offers a timely opportunity to test the interplay between social connectivity and culture and ultimately helps to disentangle evolutionary mechanisms in the archaeological record.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.
Highlights
Culture is believed to have played an important role in the social evolution of humans, and technology, for its part, has been key to their evolutionary success
Reasons may include the intrinsic limitations of the archaeological data (e.g. [13]); the difficulty of obtaining individual-level data and the need for concepts and tools to address the interplay between social connectivity and long-term cultural dynamics
For the time framework that we focus on this manuscript and the kind of processes under study, lithic artefacts are probably the best proxies to trace that relationship over inter-generational time scales
Summary
Culture is believed to have played an important role in the social evolution of humans, and technology, for its part, has been key to their evolutionary success. Multiple evidence has shown that individual social decisions (i.e. with whom and how frequently to interact) affect population-level outcomes, such as cultural transmission [4,5,6] This interplay between social connectivity and culture highlights the need to consider multi-scalar processes to investigate cultural evolution. [13]); the difficulty (and often the impossibility) of obtaining individual-level data and the need for concepts and tools to address the interplay between social connectivity and long-term cultural dynamics In this manuscript, we revisit the main approaches used to infer evolutionary processes from archaeological data. Because our methodological approach relies on the reconstruction of socio-spatial networks, its application is restricted to periods of human prehistory in which the empirical evidence (e.g. number of archaeological sites, material culture) holds sufficient resolution to trace diachronic changes in both cultural behaviour and social connectivity. We believe this approach provides new avenues to study cultural evolution in human prehistory
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