Cultural complexity and demography: the case of folktales

Abstract

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Increasing population size can inhibit cumulative cultural evolution

“…However, other studies find no evidence that a larger population size enhances CCE. For example, the complexity of folk tales was unaffected by population size (14), and the CCE of technology (the flight distance of paper planes) was unaffected by the number of artifacts to which participants had access (15). So, the experimental evidence supporting a direct link between population size and CCE is equivocal.…”

Ornament, armament, or toolkit? Modelling how population size drives the evolution of birdsong, a functional cultural trait

“…While population size has often been invoked in human cultural evolutionary theory as a factor in the maintenance or loss of learned skills [18,19,32,[79][80][81][82][83][84][85] , the existence of a straightforward relationship between population size and cultural complexity in humans has been contested [86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96] . Empirical research in humans has provided evidence both for [79,87,88,90,[97][98][99] and against [94][95][96][100][101][102][103] such a relationship; similarly, there is also debate around the relationship between population size and maintenance of a large inventory of sounds in language [104][105][106][107][108] . The effects of population size may be complicated by other properties of a population, such as migration rates and connectivity, and cultural features such as conformity, that are also important to cultural evolution.…”

Reconstructing prehistoric demography: What role for extant hunter‐gatherers?

“…[4][5][6] Demography further influences the development and variability of human culture, through its recognized role in trait transmission and cumulative culture. 7,8 Knowledge of the demography of prehistoric populations of both Homo sapiens and earlier members of the genus Homo thus has the potential to offer vital insights into human evolution across multiple domains.…”