United Kingdom

**Abstract:**

The late Robert L. Carneiro was a prominent cultural evolutionist who devoted his life to the study of the evolution of complex societies. In the 1960s and 1970s, he and his colleagues created a cross-cultural database for their Scale Analysis project. Although Carneiro published the results in several papers, the database itself never saw the light of day. Recently, we found the dataset in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History and decided to digitise it and make it publicly available online. The dataset was produced in several versions, with the latest one containing 618 binary cultural traits (presence/absence) for a global sample of 72 historically and ethnographically documented societies. The cultural traits are very diverse and include subsistence, settlement, architecture, economics, social and political organisation, warfare, religion, pottery, tools, metalworking, watercraft and law. This lightning talk will introduce Carneiro’s database and illustrate how it can be used to study of cultural evolution.

**Speaker&#39;s social media:**

Twitter: @VaclavHrncir

Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2024

Carneiro’s database: old new dataset for cultural evolution research

cultural complexity

cross-cultural dataset

cultural evolution

**Abstract:**

The late Robert L. Carneiro was a prominent cultural evolutionist who devoted his life to the study of the evolution of complex societies. In the 1960s and 1970s, he and his colleagues created a cross-cultural database for their Scale Analysis project. Although Carneiro published the results in several papers, the database itself never saw the light of day. Recently, we found the dataset in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History and decided to digitise it and make it publicly available online. The dataset was produced in several versions, with the latest one containing 618 binary cultural traits (presence/absence) for a global sample of 72 historically and ethnographically documented societies. The cultural traits are very diverse and include subsistence, settlement, architecture, economics, social and political organisation, warfare, religion, pottery, tools, metalworking, watercraft and law. This lightning talk will introduce Carneiro’s database and illustrate how it can be used to study of cultural evolution.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @VaclavHrncir

lightning talk

Welcome to the Cultural Evolution Society (CES) Conference 2024, which was a hybrid conference held at Durham University (UK). The conference was hosted in Durham by the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) with administrative assistance from the CES Transformation Fund team.

**For more information about the CES Conference, please visit the [CES Website Home Page](https://ces2024.webspace.durham.ac.uk/).**

#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
**Interdisciplinary study of cultural change and diversity**

We are a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers using evolutionary models to study cultural change and diversity.  We apply cultural evolutionary methods to a wide variety of topics including cognition, innovation, social learning, technology, art, music, narrative, religion, sociality, language and communication. We have a growing interest in applying cultural evolutionary theory to current societal challenges such as understanding the spread of prosocial health behaviours and health conspiracies.<br>
**[Discover More](https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/cultural-evolution/)**

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To access the site please register [**here**](https://ces2024.webspace.durham.ac.uk/registration-information/). 

Registration Is Required

The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

**Abstract:**

Humans adapt, not just through organic evolutionary processes but also through innovation, technology, communication, social organization, environmental exploitation and alteration, developing complex skills passed on within and between social groups. Evolutionary theorists recognize our species has a distinctive capacity to learn across generations and share that knowledge in dynamic and cumulative ways. However, much of the theorizing in evolutionary approaches are too reductive for most socio-cultural anthropologists. We argue that approaches to culture in cultural evolutionary theory can be augmented by envisioning culture as a dynamic assemblage of entangled processes at multiple levels, not necessarily reducible to constituent parts. Using such a framework, more anthropologists would be able to engage constructively with cultural evolutionary theory, and evolutionary theorists would have access to a wider range of anthropological resources. We offer Concepts in dynamic assemblages as an approach. We argue that focussing on Concepts and the dynamic assemblages within which they interface can augment exchange between cultural evolutionary theory and anthropology. Our goal is to foster dialogue and center the nuance that anthropologists require in evolutionary approaches and encourage recognition by evolutionary scholars that the cultural resources they are modelling can be more complex and yet tractable in an anthropological sense. 

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @Anthrofuentes

LIVE - More than “Information in the head”: Culture, cultural evolution, and concepts in dynamic assemblages

**Abstract:**

Few cultural practices beyond language are as widespread as string figure games. Their global
distribution and potential to yield insights into cultural transmission and cognition have long been
noted. Yet, it remains unknown how or when this behavior originated and to what extent shared
motifs are signals of repeated innovations or deep cultural transmission. Here, we combined a
global cross-cultural inventory of string figures with a novel methodology based on knot theory,
which enables the unequivocal numerical coding of string figures. We performed a computational
analysis of a sample of 826 figures from 92 societies around the world. Across these societies, we
found 83 recurring string figure designs, some of which are regionally restricted while others
display a global distribution. The cognitively opaque nature of string figure designs and their clear
geographic distribution reveals processes of cultural transmission, innovation, and convergent
evolution. Most strikingly, the global distribution of some figures raises the possibility of shared
ancient origins.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @roopekaaronen, Bluesky: @roope.bsky.social

RECORDING - A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation

**Abstract:**

Enquist et al. (2023) suggested that human cumulative cultural evolution was enabled by enhanced abilities to process and remember sequential information, leading to cultural and cognitive achievements unprecedented in other animals. This hypothesis mainly rests on results of sequence discrimination learning tasks, showing that unlike for humans, learning to discriminate between sequences is difficult for non-human animals, requiring them hundreds, often thousands of trials. It is unclear whether animals’ difficulty in these tasks reflect difficulties with remembering sequences per se or is mainly due to the arbitrary ordering of the sequence items, thus underestimating their sequencing abilities. To disentangle these effects, we investigate sequence discrimination learning with a physical task in which we contrast an “arbitrary” condition with one in which we use causal relations between stimuli to indicate which sequence yields a reward, aiming to facilitate encoding of sequential information. We present results from zoo-housed primates (23 squirrel and 24 capuchin monkeys, 13 chimpanzees), 77 human adults and 239 children (3-11 years) in an “AB vs BA, BB, AA” task, providing the first sequence discrimination study with chimpanzees and children, demonstrating that a lack of meaningful relations between sequence stimuli impedes learning in humans and potentially also great apes.

**Speaker's social media:**



RECORDING - Investigating the evolutionary and developmental origins of sequence learning in primates

**Abstract:**

Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has been claimed to be a uniquely human phenomenon pivotal to the biological success of our species. For CCE to emerge, high-fidelity social learning of know-how (form-copying) has been posited as a key mechanism. Contrary to contemporary accounts, some recent studies suggest that animal culture contains cumulative elements and that their behaviour implies form-copying. This assertion, however, remains untested. Here, we show that chimpanzees can use social learning to acquire a skill they do not independently innovate. By teaching chimpanzees how to solve a sequential task (one chimpanzee in each of the five tested groups, N=110), and using Network-Based Diffusion Analysis, we find that 28 naive chimpanzees learned the skill that had remained impossible to acquire individually during the preceding three months of exposure to all necessary materials. Moreover, we find interesting differences in learning opportunities and information transmission across the 5 groups that differ in social cohesiveness. In conjunction, we substantiate recent studies on CCE in animals and present evidence for the hitherto untested hypothesis that social learning in chimpanzees is necessary and sufficient to acquire a new, complex skill after the initial innovation.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @AnimBehav_UU

LIVE - Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate

**Abstract:**

Arguments claiming that extensions of evolutionary theory, and cultural evolution in particular, are grounded not on metaphors or analogies but on a generalisation of evolutionary principles (e.g. Aldritch et al 2008) have been criticized as lacking proper ontological bases (Reydon & Scholz, 2015) or constituting a “modest unification” that provides guidance, but not explanation (Reydon, 2021). Baraghith (2023) deals with this by proposing shared ontological grounds for generalised evolutionary theory (GET) which, while based on cultural evolution, are argued to have independent evidence in other non-biological ‘evolutionary systems’ (e.g. ‘neural darwinism’), validating GET as strong unification. 
This work considers what constitutes ‘one evolutionary system’, and asks – can culture be considered one such system? 
Guided by proposals for the structure of evolutionary explanations (Bock, 2006; Reydon, 2023), this contribution suggests evolutionary systems might be characterized/demarcated through the particular processes involved in evolutionary explanations within each system – transmission, generation of variation, population structuration, etc. Given the particularities of different cultural systems, it is argued that culture constitutes not one single evolutionary system, but many. This provides a rebuttal to claims that cultural evolution is “reductionist” – but also suggests it depends on input from other approaches to the social and language sciences. 

**Speaker's social media:**

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thiago-zahn-0747b813/

RECORDING - Is cultural evolution one example of an evolutionary system beyond biology?

**Abstract:**

A robust body of evidence supports the group-functionalist view of music. According to this view, music evolved as a participatory group activity, whose adaptive functions include strengthening and/or signaling social cohesion. Yet examples of small-scale societies in which collective music-making is rare are multiple. What kind of challenges do these examples pose to group-functionalist theories? We find that, in terms of geographical distribution, many such cases originate from Siberia and South America. We therefore take a closer look at several case studies from these regions, and consider hypotheses for the relative paucity of collective music making. We suggest that the frequency and scale of collective action, the role of expertise, variation in musical style, and cultural loss due to Western transgression, are all important explanatory factors. Nevertheless, in all the cases we consider, episodes of some form of collective music-making do (or historically did) occur during important social events, a fact which supports the group-functionalist view. Our findings also point to the centrality and ubiquity of religious function — whether supported by group or solo music-making — and suggest this aspect of musical behavior needs to be better addressed by evolutionary theories of music.

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @dorshilton

LIVE - Collective music-making and social bonding: a cross-cultural study of counterfactuals

**Abstract:**

Intersections with the global capitalist market system offer challenges and opportunities for Indigenous people living in more or less economically autonomous communities. In contexts of increasing intersection, individuals engage with new globalized culture and economic practices in diverse ways depending on their positions within local social and economic systems. While there is a substantial literature on the emergence of inequality in such settings, there is a gap in research on the pathways through which people initially start shifting towards a cash-dependent subsistence strategy. Guided by cultural evolutionary theory, and drawing on data from 200 semi-structured interviews from one village in the Republic of the Congo, we use a Bayesian probability modeling approach to examine: 1) the role of individual differences as predictors of market intersection, here focused on gender, age, and migration status; and 2) the cultural transmission modes associated with individual’s economic strategies. Our analyses are on-going, but these data have implications for understanding how life histories interact with strategic social learning to motivate behavioral change at the individual level; and how cultural evolutionary forces may scale these up to higher level changes associated with globalization, including increased socio-economic inequality and ecosystem disruption (e.g., via employment for extractive industries).

**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @utcp7b2e

RECORDING - Cultural transmission, individual differences, and globalization in a Congo Basin village

**Abstract:**

The study of gene-culture coevolution, reconciling both nominally “social” and “natural” sciences into one comprehensive framework, has been broadly applied to understand the evolution of a wide range of “species-defining” human phenotypes; from language to large-scale cooperation. Despite this appeal, the empirical evidence for gene-culture coevolution is routinely perceived to be limited to a handful of “classic” examples, most notably evolution of lactase persistence. How could such a gap between conceptual weight and empirical evidence emerge? We propose that the issue here might be two-fold – there are both conceptual ambiguities in the idea of gene-culture coevolution itself, and formidable practical challenges to discerning its signal in natural data. 

The present talk will attempt to cut through some of these difficulties, re-defining gene-culture coevolution into a broader framework, and giving insight into an ongoing project focused on re-conceptualising an empirical science of gene-culture coevolution. Using methods from landscape genomics to quantify adaptive genetic responses to variation in subsistence across the Pacific islands, we present evidence for adaptation in genes related to energy metabolism and metabolic disorder. We conclude that closer cross-disciplinary collaboration may yield a stronger empirical science of gene-culture coevolution which promises to be of both evolutionary and medical significance.



**Speaker's social media:**

Twitter: @svenkasser

LIVE - How to stop beating a dead cow: Gene-culture coevolution revisited

**Abstract:**

Previous cross-cultural research suggests that climate hazards may have profound effects on a society’s culture.  For example, in non-state societies serious food-destroying hazards (typically droughts, some floods, and pest infestations) strongly predict higher warfare frequencies and more customary beyond-household sharing.  The research question addressed here is whether non-food-destroying hazards (such as storms and seismic activity) have similar or different effects on a range of cultural traits hypothesized to be adaptive responses in a worldwide sample of nonindustrial societies. For the past two years our research team has coded the type and frequency of hazards for 132 societies in the ethnographic record using eHRAF World Cultures. Preliminary results suggest that the contrast between frequent food-destroying and frequent non-food-destroying hazard profiles generally make very different predictions. For example, societies with more non-food-destroying hazards tend to have tighter cultures (stronger norms and severe punishment for norm violations), but cultural tightness is not predicted by food-destroying hazards. Food-destroying hazards in non-state societies predict more warfare, but non-food-destroying hazards predict less warfare. We present theory and causal models suggesting explanations for these divergent findings. Understanding how humans have adapted to hazards in the recent past may help us better understand the hazards faced today. 

**Speaker's social media:**



LIVE - Food-destroying versus Non-food-destroying hazards: A worldwide comparison of differential effects on culture

**Abstract:**

Ontogenetic niche construction has been suggested as a powerful driver influencing learning capabilities and survival across a wide range of species, including humans. A key component of the human ontogenetic niche is play objects. They are ubiquitous ethnographically and display remarkable similarities cross-culturally; they also appear archaeologically in periods often characterized by increased overall rates of innovation. This study explores the role of object play as a cultural variation-generating mechanism that fuels adaption during periods of climatic stress. In a natural experimental paradigm, children’s material culture in the Inuit and Norse societies that inhabited Greenland during the so-called Little Ice Age (~1350-1800 CE) have been compared, demonstrating marked differences in corpus volume, diversity, and change across time. Notably, the Norse settlers disappeared at this time, while Inuit communities thrived. Previous hypotheses for the demise of the Norse in Greenland have been proposed, often deterministically stressing climate or land degradation. As both societies experienced largely identical climatic stress, this case study affords the opportunity to explore what cultural factors – including ontogenetic niche construction and object play – may additionally have promoted survival or collapse. 

**Speaker's social media:**

@MathildeVester5

RECORDING - A natural experiment of history: Ontogenetic niche construction, explorative object play, and adaptation during the Little Ice Age in Greenland

Carneiro’s database: old new dataset for cultural evolution research

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