Cumulative culture and complex cultural traditions

Abstract

Cumulative cultural evolution is taken to be a distinctive feature of human culture. This claim of distinctiveness is often secured by pointing to complex, late-appearing human technologies. Yet by adopting such technologies as paradigm cases of cumulative culture, researchers have unhelpfully lumped together a range of features and processes associated with the concept. This article thus has two aims. First, to disentangle four trends associated with cumulative culture: adaptiveness, complexity, efficiency, and disparity. Second, to highlight the epistemic implications of adopting (typically late-appearing) complex human technologies as the primary explanatory target of research in cumulative culture. By disaggregating the four accumulative trends, and identifying other explanatory targets, this article opens up conceptual and empirical space for work on cumulative culture in non-human animals and earlier stages in hominin evolution.