Cultural evolution articles from across Nature Portfolio

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.

Over a decade of data on wild orangutans were used to program an agent-based model of orangutan diet development. Adult-like diets were attainable only if simulated immature individuals learned from others, which indicates that orangutan diets are broader than what any individual could produce independently. Wild orangutan diets therefore represent culturally dependent knowledge repertoires that are produced by social learning.

Despite the great diversity of human languages, recurring grammatical patterns (termed ‘universals’) have been found. Using the Grambank database of more than 2,000 languages, spatiophylogenetic analyses reveal that while only a third of 191 putative universals have robust statistical support, there are still preferred feature configurations that have evolved repeatedly — consistent with shared cognitive and communicative pressures having shaped the evolutionary dynamics of languages.

In a cross-national behavioural experiment, we examined how providing information about negative externalities and making decisions observable influence prosocial behaviour. Across countries, we found that knowledge of negative externalities (as compared with opportunities for ignorance) robustly increased prosociality, and that guilt-prone individuals were more responsive to information about these negative consequences of their actions.

Central Africa is home to the greatest number of hunter-gatherers remaining in the world, but the origins of their culture remain unclear. We compiled a dataset of Central African hunter-gatherer musical instruments, subsistence tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphism data, which revealed ancient networks of cultural and linguistic exchange that spanned thousands of kilometres.

Although we have been able to track how cultural innovations spread among farming populations in prehistoric Europe, we know relatively little about this among European hunter-gatherers. Dolbunova et al. use a range of techniques to shed light on how the making and use of pottery spread among early-to-mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers west of the Urals.