The niche construction of cultural complexity: interactions between innovations, population size and the environment

Abstract

Niche construction is a process through which organisms alter their environments and, in doing so, influence or change the selective pressures to which they are subject. 'Cultural niche construction' refers specifically to the effect of cultural traits on the selective environments of other biological or cultural traits and may be especially important in human evolution. In addition, the relationship between population size and cultural accumulation has been the subject of extensive debate, in part because anthropological studies have demonstrated a significant association between population size and toolkit complexity in only a subset of studied cultures. Here, we review the role of cultural innovation in constructing human evolutionary niches and introduce a new model to describe the accumulation of human cultural traits that incorporates the effects of cultural niche construction. We consider the results of this model in light of available data on human toolkit sizes across populations to help elucidate the important differences between food-gathering societies and food-producing societies, in which niche construction may be a more potent force. These results support the idea that a population's relationship with its environment, represented here by cultural niche construction, should be considered alongside population size in studies of cultural complexity.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.

A systems approach to cultural evolution

“…Large families of models represent culture via a small number of traits, and, further, represent such traits as 'atomic' elements with no substantial interaction between them (e.g., Durham, 1991;Henrich, 2001;Kitcher, 2001;Henrich and Boyd, 2002;Rogers, 2010)-with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Enquist et al, 2011;Kolodny et al, 2015). Typically, when multiple traits are represented, they are taken to vary along a single dimension (e.g., Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981;Boyd and Richerson, 1985;Henrich, 2004), or function as an index of some other feature of interest (e.g., Fogarty and Creanza, 2017;Fogarty, 2018). While these models are all significant achievements, by idealising away multiple traits and trait interrelationships, they may be unable to represent a range of phenomena; notably those where the clustering of traits influences the downstream origination, distribution, and change in the trait pool over time.…”

Trait specialization, innovation, and the evolution of culture in fluctuating environments

“…Recently, several studies explored the consequences of different kinds of innovation, innovation rates, and "creativity" for cultural adaptation dynamics (and cultural complexity) (e.g. Kandler andLaland, 2009, 2013;Fogarty et al, 2015;Fogarty and Creanza, 2017;Fogarty, 2018). Lewis and Laland (2012), for instance, investigated the relative influence of transmission fidelity, novel invention, modification, and combination for the build-up of cumulative culture and found that while fidelity is key, modification and combination play a more important role than novel inventions.…”

The evolutionary advantage of cultural memory on heterogeneous contact networks

“…Thus far, we have been considering environmental fluctuations as external changes that alter the fitnesses of the cultural traits in question. However, cultural traits can also alter their own environment, changing the selection pressures on both cultural and genetic traits, a process known as cultural niche construction (Laland et al, 2000; Odling-Smee et al, 2003; Creanza et al, 2012; Fogarty and Creanza, 2017). This is salient to our model: with the example of food-source choice as a cultural trait, we can envision that environmental factors such as rainfall or temperature can fluctuate over time, altering the fitness of the cultural practice of gathering or farming certain food sources.…”

“…One sense in which cultural evolution is fundamentally different from genetic evolution is that environmental pressures can drive the innovation of new cultural traits: humans exposed to cold weather can invent warmer clothing in response, whereas a bacterium exposed to antibiotics cannot invent a resistance mutant in direct response. Thus, cultural evolutionary patterns could differ in harsh environments compared to stable environments, particularly if the harsh environments provide challenges that can be ‘solved’ with new behaviors or technologies (Rendell et al, 2010; Smaldino et al, 2013; Fogarty et al, 2015; Fogarty and Creanza, 2017; Fogarty, 2018).…”