**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:**

Humans and other-than-human-animals share spaces, food, and lives. However, much research neglects interspecific learning/social facilitation and what this might mean for the emergence/creation of location- and group-specific behavior, and possibly culture. In short, most studies avoid the possibility of co-created cultural evolutionary dynamics between species. Here we review macaque “cultural behavior” in the light of its origins and the possibilities of relevance to cultural evolutionary approaches. Most macaque species are synanthropes adjusting to human habitats and resources, co-creating ecological niches wherein co-constructed behaviors emerge and location-specific cultures arise. Socially learned macaque behaviors can develop without human presence, or in a human-macaque interface with interspecific facilitation or in a human-macaque interface directly as a human-macaque co-constructed behavior due to interspecific interactions. Human-macaque interactions can create behavior that is transmitted horizontally and vertically through the two groups leading to a possible distinctive local culture over time. A cultural dynamic that may be evolutionarily relevant. Understanding the dynamics of emergence and maintenance of existing behaviors requires recognizing that co-creating and co-shaping of lifeworlds, and the possibilities of a concomitant cultural evolutionary dynamic, may be a constructive approach in research at the human-macaque interface.

**Speaker's social media:**

@MaleneFHansen
@Anthrofuentes

Human-macaque co-construction of culture and the possibilities of cross-species cultural evolution 

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Cross-Disciplinary Insights

technical paper

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.

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#### Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC) 
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**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>
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Agustin Fuentes

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

Human-macaque co-construction of culture and the possibilities of cross-species cultural evolution

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