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The authors here demonstrate that hominins were consistently and specifically procuring a single kind of raw material to make stone tools at the South African site of Jojosi between 220 and 110 thousand years ago. This behaviour demonstrates both long-term planning and behavioural plasticity with how humans were interacting with their environment.

Voluntary deference to prestigious individuals is a unique feature of human social life. Here, the authors show that human prestige psychology can promote marked-yet-adaptive inequalities in influence while remaining non-coercive.

Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.

A hand stencil painted on a cave wall on a small island off the coast of Sulawesi more than 67,800 years ago suggests a very early occupation of Wallacea.

Category systems exhibit striking agreement across many cultures, yet paradoxically individuals exhibit large variation in the categorization of novel stimuli. Here the authors show that critical mass dynamics explain the convergence of independent populations on shared category systems.

Stone tools are taken as signatures of hominin behavioural evolution, but we don’t know how exactly they conferred advantages in adaptation. Here a two-million-year dataset of stone flakes reassesses the evolutionary efficiency of this technology.

Kra-Dai language family exhibits great linguistic diversity and tremendous socio-cultural importance in East Asia. In this study, the authors found that Kra-Dai languages initially diverged ~4,000 years ago in Southern China coinciding with prehistoric demic and agricultural diffusions likely driven by climate change.

Despite their great diversity, human languages are shaped by recurring grammatical universals. Verkerk et al. show that about one-third of the proposed universals hold cross-linguistically through analyses of the Grambank database.

Howard-Spink et al. develop an empirically based model of orangutan diet development, which suggests that social learning is vital for orangutans to acquire varied diets.

Several possible points of origin have been proposed for the spread of ceramic technology in Saharan Africa between 11–10,000 years ago. Here, the authors statistically model the spatio-temporal diffusion of ceramic technology using radiocarbon dates to suggest two or three origins spanning Saharan Africa.

Here, the authors present archaeological excavations from two sites paired with life-size rock engravings from 12,800 to 11,400 years ago in the Nefud desert of northern Arabia. These engravings, depicting camels, ibex and more, combined with stone tools from associated archaeological deposits and sediment analyses of playa deposits, provide evidence of human populations exploiting seasonal waterbodies.

A Bayesian phylogeographic analysis of vocabulary from 306 Pama–Nyungan languages suggests that the language family rose to dominance across Australia in a process of rapid replacement following an origin in the Gulf Plains region during the mid-Holocene.

In a voter game, information gerrymandering can sway the outcome of the vote towards one party, even when both parties have equal sizes and each player has the same influence; and this effect can be exaggerated by strategically placed zealots or automated bots.

A 3,000-year record of capuchin monkey stone tool use shows long-term variability in technology outside of the human lineage.

A field study and three experiments demonstrate that people who engage in rare (non-normative) prosocial behaviours will be more effective advocates for those behaviours than people who merely praise the virtues of these prosocial behaviours.

Analysis of over 2.5 million music listeners in three countries reveals how larger cities foster greater cultural diversity not only through demographic variety but also by enhancing individual cultural exploration

Wild chimps in Bossou, Guinea, use stone tools to crack nuts. They show individual variation in how efficient they are, and some individuals are consistently more efficient than others.

Stone tools and a disarticulated and butchered skeleton of Rhinoceros philippinensis, found in a securely dated stratigraphic context, indicate the presence of an unknown hominin population in the Philippines as early as 709 thousand years ago.

Constructing and exploring a global database, the authors find that 10% of the world’s languages are endemic to islands (a disproportionately large amount) and island area predicts number of languages. However, languages appear not to conform to all predictions of island biogeography theory.

Humans use supernatural beliefs as tools for explanation. These explanations are more likely to focus on natural phenomena than social phenomena, according to this quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 societies.

Divergence estimates from phylogenetic analyses of 109 languages of the Sino-Tibetan family support a model in which this family originates in the Yellow River basin of northern China.

A cave art scene at Leang Karampuang, Indonesia, dated to at least 51,200 years ago using laser-ablation uranium-series imaging, depicts human-like figures interacting with a pig.

Social learning facilitates adaptive behaviour, yet people engage in it to varying degrees. Here, the authors use simulations to show how this variation can stem from flexible strategies that evolve if the benefits of social learning are uncertain.

Birdsong contains strings of syllables and is essential for their communication. Using a new song decoder to annotates song in a quasi-real-time manner, and rewarding specific syllable sequences, this study shows Bengalese finches can flexibly modify the content of their song in a goal-directed way.

According to popular opinion, unethical business practices are common in the financial industry; here, the employees of a large, international bank are shown to behave, on average, honestly in a laboratory game to reveal dishonest behaviour, but when their professional identity as bank employees was rendered salient, the prevalence of dishonest behaviour increased.

Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists.

Analyses of digital corpora of annotated texts reveal the influence of stochastic drift versus selection in grammatical shifts in English and provide a general method for quantitatively testing theories of language change.

Although New Caledonian crows are known to create hooked foraging tools in the wild, here the authors show that this allows them to forage more efficiently compared with when they use non-hooked tools.

An analysis of when children develop a sense of fairness (receiving less or more than a peer) is compared across seven different societies; aversion to receiving less emerges early in childhood in all societies, whereas aversion to receiving more emerges later in childhood and only in three of the seven societies studied.

A detailed analysis of male song structure in zebra finches shows how females use particular features of songs as indicators of male quality in species that learn only one song.

We gathered genetic data for 1,763 individuals from 147 populations across 14 African countries, and 12 Late Iron Age individuals, to trace the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples over the past 6,000 years.

The modelling of human-like behaviours is one of the challenges in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Inspired by experimental studies of cultural evolution, the authors propose a reinforcement learning approach to generate agents capable of real-time  third-person imitation.

Syntax is a key feature distinguishing human language from other animal communication systems. Here, Leroux et al. show that chimpanzees produce a compositional syntactic-like structure, suggesting syntax might be evolutionary ancient and potentially already present in our last common ancestor with chimpanzees.

The Neolithic transition spread across Europe via a coastal, southern route and an inland, central route. Here, the authors use haplogroup clines and space-time simulations to show that interbreeding between farmers and hunter-gatherers was the same along both routes.

Cumulative cultural evolution is ubiquitous in humans, but is rarely observed in non-human animals. Here, Williams et al. report elaboration of songs over several decades in Savannah sparrows, consistent with cumulative cultural evolution.

Archaeogenetic study of ancient DNA from medieval northwestern Europeans reveals substantial increase of continental northern European ancestry in Britain, suggesting mass migration across the North Sea during the Early Middle Ages.

It has been hypothesized that language depends on a capacity to produce and recognize two items (e.g., “come” + “talk”) as a single unit (e.g., “come talk”). Here, the authors show that a wild passerine also uses this capacity in vocal communication.

During the Last Ice Age, Neanderthals used a small cave in the Iberian Peninsula to accumulate the crania of large ungulates (bison, aurochs, red deer and rhinoceroses), some associated with small hearths. This seems to have been a symbolic practice.

This research finds that negative adjectives evolve faster over history than positive adjectives, with limited evidence for other parts of speech. Individual people are also more likely to replace negative words than positive words.

Asia is an emerging centre of growth in the field of urology owing to large and varied patient populations, the availability of a trained workforce, the use of English as a common language, and overall low costs. Asian urology has immense potential to expand in areas in which it currently lags behind, especially research. In this Perspective, Kumar uses a strength–weakness–opportunities–threats (SWOT) analysis to discuss the current state of urology in Asia and comment on the future direction of this field in this region.

By digitizing a large lexical dataset of Chinese dialects and comparing it to genetic profiles, Yang et al. reveal a hybrid model of language diffusion, consisting of both population migrations and social learning across different regions of China.