Work

Cultural macroevolution and the transmission of traits

Year: 2006

Type: article

Abstract: Cultural traits are distributed across human societies in a patterned way. Study of the mechanisms whereby cultural traits persist and change over time is key to understanding human cultural diversity. For more than a century, a central question has engaged anthropologists interested in the study of cultural trait variation: What is the source of cultural variation? More precisely, are cultural traits transmitted primarily from ancestral to descendant populations (vertical transmission) or between contemporary, typically neighboring populations (horizontal transmission), or do they emerge as independent innovations? While debates among unilineal evolutionists and diffusionists have long since faded, there is still much uncertainty about how traits are transmitted at this macroevolutionary level, as well as about the implications of these transmission patterns for testing hypotheses regarding the adaptive function of particular cultural traits across human populations.

Source: Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews

DOI: 10.1002/evan.20088

Authors: Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Charles L. Nunn, Mary C. Towner

Institutions: University of California, Davis, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Language: English

Topic: Language and cultural evolution

Subfield: Cultural Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funder: National Science Foundation

Awards: Comparative Method Development within Anthropology, Comparative Methods in Anthropology