Denmark

**Author(s):** Aguirre-Fernández, G; Jett, SC; Carrillo-Briceño, JD., Sánchez-Villagra MR. &lt;br&gt;The blowgun is a tubular weapon from which a projectile (a pellet or dart) is propelled by the force of human breath. In the Americas, blowguns have archaeological records (as iconographic evidence) in Peru and Mexico, dating back to ca. 500 AD. Ethnographically, the use of blowguns has a wide although discontinuous distribution, present in eastern USA and from southern Mexico to areas in the Amazon. The weapon is most widely used and technologically diverse in the tropical forest of the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Particular attributes of the blowguns have been recognized, their distribution and evolution outlined and potential evolutionary pathways have been discussed in meticulous detail in previous papers. For this project, we assembled, updated and homogenised blowgun data for 141 societies in South America from seminal sources; the dataset was then associated with Glottolog data in order to provide comparisons among language groups and plot their geographic distribution. We are currently collecting new primary data from museum collections and integrating a large unpublished archive curated over the last 60 years by SCJ into our dataset. Our ultimate aim is to provide a systematic analysis of blowgun traits (both quantitative and qualitative) in order to test hypotheses on technological innovation and distribution across the world.

Cultural Evolution Society 2022

Blowguns in time and space

ethnology

hunting

weapons

south america

blowguns

archaeology

material culture

### Welcome to the fourth Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2022! 

As last year, Underline will support the online component of the conference. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty for all of us. Therefore, we seek to offer a hybrid format that will hopefully allow some folks to travel to Aarhus, others to meet up locally or regionally in CES hub-lets, and other yet to participate online. 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.

##### ***For SoMe interaction and live tweeting please tag @CulturalEvolSoc and use #CESconf2022***


#### The CES 2022 local organising committee
* Luseadra Joy McKerracher
* Jesper Sørensen 
* Niels Nørkjær Johannsen 
* Benjamin Grant Purzycki 
* Mette Løvschal 
* Felix Riede
* Iza Romanowska 
* Karsten Olsen

Please click on the button bellow if you want to watch the videos

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.

**Author(s):** Aguirre-Fernández, G; Jett, SC; Carrillo-Briceño, JD., Sánchez-Villagra MR. The blowgun is a tubular weapon from which a projectile (a pellet or dart) is propelled by the force of human breath. In the Americas, blowguns have archaeological records (as iconographic evidence) in Peru and Mexico, dating back to ca. 500 AD. Ethnographically, the use of blowguns has a wide although discontinuous distribution, present in eastern USA and from southern Mexico to areas in the Amazon. The weapon is most widely used and technologically diverse in the tropical forest of the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Particular attributes of the blowguns have been recognized, their distribution and evolution outlined and potential evolutionary pathways have been discussed in meticulous detail in previous papers. For this project, we assembled, updated and homogenised blowgun data for 141 societies in South America from seminal sources; the dataset was then associated with Glottolog data in order to provide comparisons among language groups and plot their geographic distribution. We are currently collecting new primary data from museum collections and integrating a large unpublished archive curated over the last 60 years by SCJ into our dataset. Our ultimate aim is to provide a systematic analysis of blowgun traits (both quantitative and qualitative) in order to test hypotheses on technological innovation and distribution across the world.

technical paper

**Author(s):** None INTRODUCTION: Scientific debate on the evolutionary function(s) of music has lately intensified with leading theories highlighting its capacity for social bonding & credible signaling. Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic provide ideal opportunities for establishing selective pressure on music behavior. This talk synthesizes empirical evidence collected by the global MUSICOVID network to argue that contextually tailored musical innovations may help humans endure societal struggle.
 METHODS: Representative survey data from FR, DE, IN, IT, UK & US (n=5,113) during Apr-May 2020 were subjected to LightGBM modelling to predict socio-emotional coping via music from behavioral changes. A corona-themed music video database (n=465) was crowdsourced. Sentiment was quantified in tweets (n≈16M), subreddits (n≈53K), Spotify playlists (n=10K), YouTube comments (n=125K) & news articles (n≈46K).
 RESULTS: Music aided coping for ~50% of people, being superior to many other strategies. Widespread interest in coronamusic was by far the strongest predictor of successful musical coping, and a functional bifurcation emerged between negative- & positive-experiencers using music for solitary mood regulation and as a proxy for social interaction, respectively.
 CONCLUSIONS: These data provocatively suggest that topical music may have been adaptive in building resilience during human evolution.

Topical musical innovations may have helped humans endure societal struggle during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond

**Author(s):** Nakamura, E; Singh, R While previous studies on music evolution focused on analysis of trends in features in historical data, construction of a mathematical model that can predict the evolution of the distribution of musical products remains as a challenge. This is especially because the distribution of music styles in a society has a complex structure consisting of clusters that dynamically change.
To understand these complex dynamics, we developed statistical modeling methods and analyzed two large datasets of popular music created in Japan and the US.
We found that intra-cluster dynamics, such as the contraction and shift of a cluster, as well as inter-cluster dynamics represented by clusters' relative frequencies, often exhibit notable dynamical modes that hold across different cultures. Moreover, we developed an evolutionary model incorporating these dynamical modes and showed that it is effective for predicting the future creation style distributions.
Our results indicate the importance of an accurate model of cluster dynamics for predicting future distributions of cultural artefacts. The proposed methodology is general and can potentially be applied to other domains of creative culture.

Predictive modeling of dynamic cluster structure of popular music creation styles

**Author(s):** Shilton, D; Passmore, S; Savage, PE Singing is involved in the most crucial events defining social life. One important feature of music performance is its sociovocal organization, ranging from unaccompanied solo to a multi-part chorus. It was previously hypothesized that this feature is related to social organization, so that emphasis on solo singing is more common in large-scale hierarchical societies, while levelled group singing is more common in small-scale egalitarian ones.

We analyze two global song corpora: Cantometrics (5,776 coded recordings from 1,026 societies) and NHS Ethnography (4,709 coded ethnographic texts from 60 societies). We examine the prevalence of group singing, and fit multilevel models predicting sociovocal organization based on social context and measures of social complexity.

We find that in both corpora, group singing is more common overall and in most societies, and its likelihood is dependent on social context. Social complexity is associated with greater likelihood of solo singing and more leader-dominant group singing.

These results support previous proposals that music is primarily a communal phenomenon and that sociovocal organization and social complexity are functionally related.

Group singing is globally dominant, and is related to both social context and social complexity

**Author(s):** Brooks, RC, Blake, KR, Fromhage, L Resources influence the formation and success of human consortships. Resource distribution within a society should, therefore, influence the mating opportunities an individual of given status/wealth experiences. In particular, in societies both contemporary and historic, women prefer mates of higher rather than lower status and wealth, a pattern known as ‘hypergyny’. Within-sex competition is influenced by an interaction between preferences and the distribution of resources. Empirical studies show that economic inequality within a sex can amplify mating competition, and that inequalities between women and men influence mate competition behaviours, but the links between resource distribution and mating competition have received less theoretic attention. We model hypergyny’s effects on mating competition among men and among women within a heterosexual mating market. Lower mating success of poorer men and richer women (compared with richer men and poorer women) is worsened when resource gender gaps are small or when women out-earn men on average. Within-sex inequality amplifies competition. We consider the implications for cultural regulation of inequalities and mating norms.

How gender inequity and income inequality affect mating markets, and how they may shape culture

**Author(s):** Angel, H.-F., Seitz, R. Beliefs have a life on their own: they are born, grow, expand, and eventually may fade away and get extinct. It is relatively easy to describe beliefs and the believing processes in similar terms to living beings, and to apply to them a similar axiomatic as the evolutionary model provides: variations, selection, adaptation, and reproduction. In the current wild and accelerated state we witness the formation of new beliefs in our time: thanks to the development of new media and social networks beliefs clearly follow patterns of variation, selection and successful reproduction, but the living cycle is now often shorter and riskier. In any case, we need a better knowledge of the evolution of beliefs, both in the long run, or from a historical perspective, and in the short run, following current trends. What seems clear is that the current study of cultural evolution would greatly benefit from inputs from the new scientific study of beliefs and believing processes. The Creditions model offers opportunities to work out that link and to enrich the framework of cultural evolution.

The evolution of beliefs and believing as a case for cultural evolution

**Author(s):** Foster, D; Mesoudi, A; Postma, E; Lamba, S Introduction: We aimed to test evolutionary theories of cooperation in the context of a real-world social dilemma: joint liability microfinance. To do so we meta-analyse predictors from microfinance studies to estimate their overall associations with loan repayment, and to assess the uncertainty and generalisability of these estimates. Methods: We pre-registered our meta-analytic protocol and hypotheses, conducted literature searches, screened studies for eligibility and assessed their risk of bias, and developed Bayesian multilevel models to estimate meta-analytic associations between loan repayment and proxies of 4 evolutionary mechanisms proposed to support cooperation: relatedness, reciprocity, partner choice, and punishment. Results: Punishment-based variables showed the strongest positive associations with loan repayment, with mixed results for other mechanisms. Estimates vary widely in their certainty, with high levels of effect heterogeneity. Conclusions: Our results provide some evidence for evolutionary mechanisms supporting cooperation in real-world contexts, and suggest there are non-generalisable findings and/or reproducibility issues in the microfinance literature.

Meta-Analysis of Predictors of Cooperation and Loan Repayment in Microfinance Groups

 This project is an exploratory study of folk intuitions about the moral domain, conducted in the U.S., China, India and Pakistan. Theorists disagree widely about how to define morality, so the science of morality has no principled way to identify its own target domain. This gives rise to many irresolvable debates. However, new methods in experimental philosophy make it possible to replace the theoretical debate over definitions with an empirical research program, by “defining” morality according to the folk concept, rather than theoretical principles. The study illustrates how the right intuitions can be measured, and how the data bear on the scientific debate. 
Such intuitions evolve culturally, however, so these intuitions may vary too widely for the folk concept to be coherent. To address this, the study spanned the distinct cultures of Western, Chinese, and Indian civilization (N=1,612). A questionnaire elicited judgments of “moralness” for a set of normative claims that represents the scientific debate. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to distinguish moral clusters from non-moral ones, and to identify sub-clusters within the moral domain. Results showed striking agreement across all samples in the moral domain’s scope, and only minor disagreement over internal structure. This supports the conclusion that the empirical approach to identifying the moral domain is viable.

An Empirical Approach to Identifying the Moral Domain

**Author(s):** Brand, C O; Smaldino, P E. Complex behaviours are said to be transmitted from one person to another via high-fidelity social learning mechanisms. However, many behaviours are too opaque to be learnt via imitation alone, and require teaching with verbal communication. Although human language facilitates the explanation of complex behaviours in precise detail, we argue that direct, literal communication is overly costly and inefficient in many cases. Instead, humans use shortcuts such as analogies that enable compression of meaning (Brand et al. 2021). In their model of tacit knowledge, Miton & Dedeo (2022) find that “a small amount of guidance, well-presented, allows students to lock-in a culturally-widespread practice”. We predict that the “well-presented guidance” relies on analogies that relate novel behaviour to familiar behaviour in the learner’s repertoire. We present a formal model in which behavioural components are formalised as nodes in a network, and analogies as shared relationships between the edge-structures of different networks. We will present preliminary work on the model and its implications for Cultural Evolutionary theory, and for the origins of language and cognition.

Analogy as a critical component for communicating complex cultural information

**Author(s):** Eruchimovitch, I; Michaeli, M; Sarid, A To unravel the roots of the relationship between the Individualism-Collectivism dimension of culture (IC) and market-supporting institutions, we develop a micro-founded model in which the two interact and coevolve. IC and institutions are related indirectly, via social organization: Individuals settle either in the Market, an individualistic, interest-based organization, or in the Clan, a collectivistic, kinship-based organization. In a static model, the size of the Market positively depends on the strength of individualistic inclinations and on the quality of market-supporting institutions. In a dynamic model, where IC and institutions are endogenous, there exist up to two stable steady states, one with a predominately individualistic culture, high institutional quality and a large Market, and one with a completely collectivistic culture, no institutions and a desolate Market. The convergence to each steady state depends on initial conditions of IC. We conclude that contemporary IC and institutions exhibit path dependence and are thus related to the historical conditions in each region. Using institutional and historical data, we provide empirical evidence in support of our model. In addition, we apply the model to a specific historical case: the cultural and institutional divergence between China and Europe.

On the Coevolution of Individualism and Institutions

**Author(s):** Barrera-Cruz, M; García-Rivero, D The study of lithic assemblages enables an approximated knowledge about the economic activities of past populations. Here, lithic tools from Dehesilla cave are examined alongside the remains of organic resources, such as the remains of fauna, seeds and fruits to achieve a reconstruction of the production patterns documented in the Southern Iberian Peninsula throughout the entire Neolithic period. While direct and indirect gradient analysis are carried out to allow detection of patterns between the different Neolithic periods, diversity analysis is useful to generate some information about variability of environmental exploitation strategies. Results show a significant increase in volume of the vegetable resources in the Middle Neolithic A (MNA), when the naked wheat (Triticum aestivum-durum) predominates, in addition to a differential replication of tools related to vegetal and landscape transformation activities. In conclusion, the analyses suggest a change in the subsistence patterns in the MNA (ca. 4800-4500 cal BC) in opposition to the previous Early Neolithic period, which is characterized by a mixed and more diverse economy (livestock and agriculture), such as a more diverse assemblage of lithic tools.

Blowguns in time and space

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Topical musical innovations may have helped humans endure societal struggle during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond

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