Organized as a satellite to the annual Conference on Complex Systems, the Evolution of Cultural Complexity held its inaugural workshop in Tempe, Arizona, in 2015, a second in Cancún, Mexico, in 2017, and a third in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2018. The goal of those satellite sessions was to bring together a community of researchers from different fields who had interests in the evolution of cultural complexity. This special issue includes three papers that grew out of those workshops and one paper that was solicited. Each brings a unique perspective on myriad issues that surround how and why culture evolves. One issue that is key to understanding the evolution of cultural complexity—and it is addressed in the papers included here—is how humans learn and transmit information and the rate at which it is learned and transmitted.
AnderssonC.ReadD. (2016). The evolution of cultural complexity: Not by the treadmill alone. Current Anthropology, 57, 261–286.
2.
BentleyR. A.O’BrienM. J. (2011). The selectivity of social learning and the tempo of cultural evolution. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 9, 125–141.
3.
BentleyR. A.O’BrienM. J. (2012). Cultural evolutionary tipping points in the storage and transmission of information. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, Article 569. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00569
4.
BentleyR. A.O’BrienM. J. (2014). Mapping collective behavior in the big-data era. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 63–119.
5.
BothaR.KnightC. (Eds.). (2009). The cradle of language. Oxford University Press.
6.
BrooksA. (2010). What does it mean to be human? A behavioral perspective. Anthronotes, 31, 1–10.
7.
CollardM.VaesenK.CosgroveR.RoebroeksW. (2016). The empirical case against the demographic turn in Palaeolithic archaeology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 371, 20150242.
8.
CurryO. S.MullinsD. A.WhitehouseH. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60, 47–69.
9.
DaemsD. (2020). On complex archaeologies: Conceptualizing social complexity and its potential for archaeology. Adaptive Behavior, 28, 323–328.
10.
DerexM.MesoudiA. (2020). Cumulative cultural evolution within evolving population structures. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24, 654–667. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.04.005
11.
DingW. W.LevinS. G.StephanP. E.WinklerA. E. (2010). The impact of information technology on academic scientists’ productivity and collaboration patterns. Management Science, 6, 1439–1461.
12.
DonoghueJ. P. (2008). Bridging the brain to the world: A perspective on neural interface systems. Neuron, 60, 511–521.
13.
EllisonG.FudenbergD. (2003). Knife-edge or plateau: When do market models tip?Quarterly Review of Economics, 118, 1249–1278.
14.
GladwellM. (2000). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference. Little Brown.
15.
GouldS. J. (1989). Wonderful life: The Burgess Shale and the nature of history. Norton.
16.
HenrichJ. (2004). Demography and cultural evolution: How adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses: The Tasmanian case. American Antiquity, 69, 197–214.
17.
HenrichJ. (2006). Understanding cultural evolutionary models: A reply to Read’s critique. American Antiquity, 71, 771–782.
18.
HenrichJ.BoydR.DerexM.KlineM. A.MesoudiA.MuthukrishnaM.PowellA. T.ShennanS. J.ThomasM. G. (2016). Understanding cumulative cultural evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, E6724–E6725.
19.
HochbergL. R.SerruyaM. D.FriehsG. M.MukandJ.A.SalehM.CaplanA. H.. . . DonoghueJ. P. (2006). Neuronal ensemble control of prosthetic devices by a human with tetraplegia. Nature, 442, 164–171.
20.
JacobsZ.RobertsR. G.GalbraithR. F.DeaconH. J.GrünR.MackayA.. . . WadleyL. (2008). Ages for the Middle Stone Age of southern Africa: Implications for human behavior and dispersal. Science, 322, 733–735.
21.
JamesH. V. A.PetragliaM. (2005). Modern human origins and the evolution of behaviour in the later Pleistocene of South Africa. Current Anthropology, 46, S3–S27.
22.
KantnerJ. (2002). Complexity. In HartJ. P.TerrellJ. E. (Eds.), Darwin and archaeology: A handbook of key concepts (pp. 89–106). Bergin & Garvey.
23.
KlineM. A.BoydR. (2010). Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 277, 2559–2564.
24.
LambersonP. J.PageS. E. (2012). Tipping points. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 7, 175–208.
25.
MakinJ. G.MosesD. A.ChangE. F. (2020). Machine translation of cortical activity to text with an encoder–decoder framework. Nature Neuroscience, 23, 575–582.
26.
MorganL. H. (1877). Ancient society. Holt.
27.
NicholsJ. (1998). The origin and dispersal of languages: Linguistic evidence. In JablonskiN.AielloL. C. (Eds.), The origin and diversification of language (pp. 127–170). Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences.
PerreaultC.MathewS. (2012). Dating the origin of language using phonemic diversity. PLoS ONE, 7, e35289.
30.
PowellA.ShennanS.ThomasM. G. (2009). Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behavior. Science, 324, 1298–1301.
31.
PremoL. S. (2016). Effective population size and the effects of demography on cultural diversity and technological complexity. American Antiquity, 81, 605–622.
32.
ReadD.AnderssonC. (2020). Cultural complexity and complexity evolution. Adaptive Behavior, 28, 329–358.
33.
SchifferM. B. (2005). The devil is in the details: The cascade model of invention processes. American Antiquity, 70, 485–502.
34.
SchmidC. (2020). Evaluating cultural transmission in Bronze Age burial rites of central, northern and northwestern Europe using radiocarbon data. Adaptive Behavior, 28, 359–376.
35.
ShennanS. (2001). Demography and cultural innovation: A model and its implications for the emergence of modern human culture. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 11, 5–16.
36.
SikkK.CarusoG. (2020). A spatially explicit ABM of Central Place Foraging Theory and its explanatory power for hunter–gatherer settlement pattern formation processes. Adaptive Behavior, 28, 377–396.
VaesenK.CollardM.CosgroveR.RoebroeksW. (2016). Population size does not explain past changes in cultural complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, E2241–E2247.
39.
WimalasenaL. N.MillerL. E.PandarinathC. (2020). From unstable input to robust output. Nature Biomedical Engineering, 4, 665–667.
