Abstract
Modern phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used to address questions about macro-level patterns in cultural evolution. These methods can illuminate the unobservable histories of cultural traits and identify the evolutionary drivers of trait change over time, but their application is not without pitfalls. Here, we outline the current scope of research in cultural tree thinking, highlighting a toolkit of best practices to navigate and avoid the pitfalls and ‘abuses' associated with their application. We emphasize two principles that support the appropriate application of phylogenetic methodologies in cross-cultural research: researchers should (1) draw on multiple lines of evidence when deciding if and which types of phylogenetic methods and models are suitable for their cross-cultural data, and (2) carefully consider how different cultural traits might have different evolutionary histories across space and time. When used appropriately phylogenetic methods can provide powerful insights into the processes of evolutionary change that have shaped the broad patterns of human history.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution'.
Highlights
Theories of cultural evolution are built on the observation that cultural features undergo innovation, modification and transmission
An important distinction in cultural phylogenetics research is between methods of building trees (i.e. reconstructing the histories of cultural units based on assumptions of vertical transmission of cultural features; figure 1a) and methods that use previously constructed trees in models that investigate the evolution and distribution of other cultural traits
Rate of 50% of all traits in the data being borrowed every 1000 years. For each of these simulated datasets, they used Bayesian phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the phylogeny and compared the reconstructed phylogeny with the original known phylogenies. These results showed that Bayesian phylogenetic methods were, highly robust to borrowing—able to correctly recover trees very similar to the original ones even under quite high levels of borrowing of approximately 15% every 1000 years
Summary
Modern phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used to address questions about macro-level patterns in cultural evolution. These methods can illuminate the unobservable histories of cultural traits and identify the evolutionary drivers of trait change over time, but their application is not without pitfalls. We emphasize two principles that support the appropriate application of phylogenetic methodologies in cross-cultural research: researchers should (1) draw on multiple lines of evidence when deciding if and which types of phylogenetic methods and models are suitable for their cross-cultural data, and (2) carefully consider how different cultural traits might have different evolutionary histories across space and time. When used appropriately phylogenetic methods can provide powerful insights into the processes of evolutionary change that have shaped the broad patterns of human history. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’
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