Studies in Western cultures have observed that both children and adults tend to overimitate, copying causally irrelevant actions in the presence of clear causal information. Investigation of this feature in non-Western groups has found little difference cross-culturally in the frequency or manner with which individuals overimitate. However, each of the non-Western populations studied thus far has a history of close interaction with Western cultures, such that they are now far removed from life in a hunter-gatherer or other small-scale culture. To investigate overimitation in a context of limited Western cultural influences, we conducted a study with the Aka hunter-gatherers and neighboring Ngandu horticulturalists of the Congo Basin rainforest in the southern Central African Republic. Aka children, Ngandu children, and Aka adults were presented with a reward retrieval task similar to those performed in previous studies, involving a demonstrated sequence of causally relevant and irrelevant actions. Aka children were found not to overimitate as expected, instead displaying one of the lowest rates of overimitation seen under similar conditions. Aka children copied fewer irrelevant actions than Aka adults, used a lower proportion of irrelevant actions than Ngandu children and Aka adults, and had less copying fidelity than Aka adults. Measures from Ngandu children were intermediate between the two Aka groups. Of the participants that succeeded in retrieving the reward, 60% of Aka children used emulation rather than imitation, compared to 15% of Ngandu children, 11% of Aka adults, and 0% of Western children of similar age. From these results, we conclude that cross-cultural variation exists in the use of overimitation during childhood. Further study is needed under a more diverse representation of cultural and socioeconomic groups in order to investigate the cognitive underpinnings of overimitation and its possible influences on social learning and the biological and cultural evolution of our species.

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In the state of Colorado, a citizen ballot initiative to reintroduce gray wolves (Canis Lupus) is eliciting polarization and conflict among multiple stakeholder and interest groups. Given this complex social landscape, we examined the social context surrounding wolf reintroduction in Colorado as of 2019. We used an online survey of 734 Coloradans representative in terms of age and gender, and we sampled from different regions across the state, to examine public beliefs and attitudes related to wolf reintroduction and various wolf management options. We also conducted a content analysis of media coverage on potential wolf reintroduction in 10 major daily Colorado newspapers from January 2019, when the signature-gathering effort for the wolf reintroduction initiative began, through the end of January 2020, when the initiative was officially added to the ballot. Our findings suggest a high degree of social tolerance or desire for wolf reintroduction in Colorado across geographies, stakeholder groups, and demographics. However, we also find that a portion of the public believes that wolves would negatively impact their livelihoods, primarily because of concerns over the safety of people and pets, loss of hunting opportunities, and potential wolf predation on livestock. These concerns—particularly those related to livestock losses—are strongly reflected in the media. We find that media coverage has focused only on a few of the many perceived positive and negative impacts of wolf reintroduction identified among the public. Our findings highlight the need to account for this diversity of perspectives in future decisions and to conduct public outreach regarding likely impacts of wolf reintroduction.

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Humans regularly exert a powerful influence on the survival and persistence of species, yet social‐science information is used only sporadically in conservation decisions. Using data obtained from a survey of 46,894 US residents, we developed and applied a spatially explicit “sociocultural index” to inform decision making through an understanding of public values toward wildlife. The classification is defined by opposing values of mutualism and domination, which have been previously shown to be highly predictive of attitudes on a wide range of policy issues. We developed state and county maps that can be used to represent public interests in policy decisions and inform management actions that target human behavior, such as education. To illustrate, we present findings indicating a supportive social context for gray wolf (Canis lupus) reintroduction in Colorado, an issue voted on and passed through a November 2020 citizen ballot initiative. Although the results are particularly relevant for the US, the technique is broadly applicable and its expansion is encouraged to better account for human factors in conservation decisions globally.

Cultural transmission biases such as prestige are thought to have been a primary driver in shaping the dynamics of human cultural evolution. However, few empirical studies have measured the importance of prestige relative to other effects, such as content biases present within the information being transmitted. Here, we report the findings of an experimental transmission study designed to compare the simultaneous effects of a model using a high-or low-prestige regional accent with the presence of narrative content containing social, survival, emotional, moral, rational, or counterintuitive information in the form of a creation story. Results from multimodel inference reveal that prestige is a significant factor in determining the salience and recall of information, but that several content biases, specifically social, survival, negative emotional, and biological counterintuitive information, are significantly more influential. Further, we find evidence that reliance on prestige cues may serve as a conditional learning strategy when no content cues are available. Our results demonstrate that content biases serve a vital and underappreciated role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Social media summary: Storyteller and tale are both key to memorability, but some content is more important than the storyteller's prestige.

19A major outstanding question in human prehistory is the fate of hunting and gathering populations 20 following the rise of agriculture and pastoralism. Genomic analysis of ancient and contemporary 21Europeans suggests that autochthonous groups were either absorbed into or replaced by expanding 22 farmer populations. Many of the hunter-gatherer populations persisting today live in Africa, perhaps 23 because agropastoral transitions occurred later on the continent. Here, we present the first genomic 24 data from the Chabu, a relatively isolated and marginalized hunting-and-gathering group from the 25 Southwestern Ethiopian highlands. The Chabu are a distinct genetic population that carry the highest 26 levels of Southwestern Ethiopian ancestry of any extant population studied thus far. This ancestry has 27 been in situ for at least 4,500 years. We show that the Chabu are undergoing a severe population 28 bottleneck which began around 40 generations ago. We also study other Eastern African populations 29 and demonstrate divergent patterns of historical population size change over the past 60 generations 30 between even closely related groups. We argue that these patterns demonstrate that, unlike in Europe, 31Africans hunter-gatherers responded to agropastoralism with diverse strategies. 32 33Since the beginning of the Holocene 12,000 years ago (ya), the dominant mode of human subsistence 34 has shifted from hunting and gathering to agriculture through a process known as the Neolithic 35 transition. Whether this transition occurred primarily through the mass movement of people from 36 centers of domestication (demic diffusion) or through the cultural transmission of agricultural practices 37 (cultural adoption) is still debated in archaeology, genetics and anthropology (1, 2). As this transition 38 largely concluded by 4,000 ya in Europe and Asia, there remains little direct evidence of on-the-ground 39 interaction between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalist migrants. Theoretically, in the face of 40 displacement and conflict over resources, hunter-gatherer populations might respond in a variety of 41 ways: 1) intermarry with the migrant group and adopt their agropastoral subsistence practices 42 (substantial genetic exchange); 2) adopt the subsistence practices of the migrants without intermarriage 43 (limited genetic exchange); 3) reduce their geographic range or resource acquisition (leading to a decline 44 in population size); 4) enter into an economic-symbolic exchange relationship with the migrant group; or 45 5) move to an ecological region that is marginal for pastoralism or agriculture (3, 4). These are not 46 mutually exclusive; the history of any particular hunter-gatherer group may involve multiple modes of 47

Prestige is a key concept across the social and behavioral sciences and has been implicated as an important driver in the processes governing human learning and behavior and the evolution of culture. However, existing scales of prestige fail to account for the full breadth of its potential determinants or focus only on collective social institutions rather than the individual-level perceptions that underpin everyday social interactions. Here, we use open, extensible methods to unite diverse theoretical ideas into a common measurement tool for individual prestige. Participants evaluated the perceived prestige of regional variations in accented speech using a pool of candidate scale items generated from free-listing tasks and a review of published scales. Through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we find that our resulting 7-item scale, composed of dimensions we term position, reputation, and information ("PRI"), exhibits good model fit, scale validity, and scale reliability. The PRI scale of individual prestige contributes to the integration of existing lines of theory on the concept of prestige, and the scale's application in Western samples and its extensibility to other cultural contexts serves as a foundation for new theoretical and experimental trajectories across the social and behavioral sciences.