Andrew Whiten’s research while affiliated with University of St Andrews and other places

Although cumulative culture is a hallmark of hominin evolution, its origins can be traced back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees. Here, we investigated the evolutionary origins of chimpanzee cumulative culture and why it remained incipient. To trace cultural transmission among the four chimpanzee subspecies, we compared population networks based on genetic markers of recent migration and shared cultural traits. We show that limited levels of group connectivity favored the emergence of a few instances of cumulative culture in chimpanzees. As in humans, cultural complexification likely happened in steps, with transmission between populations, incremental changes, and repurposing of technologies. We propose that divergence in social patterns led to increased mobility between groups in the genus Homo , resulting in irreversible dependence on cultural exchange and complexification.

Costly rituals are ubiquitous and adaptive. Yet, little is known about how children develop to acquire them. The current study examined children's imitation of costly rituals. Ninety‐three 4–6 year olds (47 girls, 45% Oceanians, tested in 2022) were shown how to place tokens into a tube to earn stickers, using either a ritualistic or non‐ritualistic costly action sequence. Children shown the ritualistic actions imitated faithfully at the expense of gaining stickers; conversely, those shown the non‐ritualistic actions ignored them and obtained maximum reward. This highlights how preschool children are adept at and motivated to learn rituals, despite significant material cost. This study provides insights into the early development of cultural learning and the adaptive value of rituals in group cognition.

After seeing an action sequence children and adults tend to copy causally relevant and, morestrikingly, even perceivably unnecessary actions in relation to the given goal. This phenomenon,termed “over-imitation”, has inspired much empirical research in the past decade as well as livelytheoretical debate on its cognitive underpinnings and putative role in the transmission of culturalknowledge. Here, we offer a comprehensive review of the existing literature to date, accom-panied by a table including concise information on 54 published studies testing over-imitation indifferent species, age groups and cultures. We highlight methodological issues related to task andcontext that influence over-imitation rates and that should be carefully considered in study de-signs. We discuss the cognitive and motivational processes underlying and contributing to over-imitation, including normative action parsing, causal reasoning, motives of affiliation and sociallearning as well as their complex interplay. We conclude that despite the apparent irrationality ofover-imitation behavior, recent studies have shown that its performance depends on the specifictask, modeled actions and context variables, suggesting that over-imitation should be con-ceptualized as a contextually flexible and, in fact, a normally highly functional phenomenon.

Children have a proclivity to learn through faithful imitation, but the extent to which this applies under significant cost remains unclear. To address this, we investigated whether 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children ( N = 97) would stop imitating to forego a desirable food reward. We presented participants with a task involving arranging marshmallows and craft sticks, with the goal being either to collect marshmallows or build a tower. Children replicated the demonstrated actions with high fidelity regardless of the goal, but retrieved rewards differently. Children either copied the specific actions needed to build a tower, prioritizing tower completion over reward; or adopted a novel convention of stacking materials before collecting marshmallows, and developed their own method to achieve better outcomes. These results suggest children's social learning decisions are flexible and context‐dependent, yet that when framed by an ostensive goal, children imitated in adherence to the goal despite incurring significant material costs.

While cumulative culture is a hallmark of hominin evolution, its origins can be traced back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees. Here we investigate the evolutionary origins of chimpanzee cumulative culture, and why it remained incipient. To trace cultural transmission among the four chimpanzee subspecies, we built between-populations networks based on genetic markers of recent migration and shared cultural traits. We show that limited levels of interconnectivity favoured the emergence of a few instances of cumulative culture in chimpanzees. As in humans, cultural complexification likely happened in steps, with between-community transmission promoting incremental changes and repurposing of technologies. We propose that divergence in social patterns led to increased between-group mobility in Homo , propelling our lineage towards a trajectory of irreversible dependence on cultural complexification. One-Sentence Summary Population interconnectivity and migration explain the origins of chimpanzee cumulative culture and why it remained incipient

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My critical review [1] elicited a welcome diversity of perspectives across the 12 commentaries now published [2-13]. In total 28 co-authors were inspired to contribute. In addition to engaging with the critical perspectives of my review, several of the commentaries take the debates and discussions into insightful and potentially important supplementary domains that I highlight in what follows. I have extracted a number of major themes in which I detected overlaps in the foci of different commentaries, and I use these to organise my replies. I hope that our shared efforts will constitute some degree of 'cultural evolution' in our science, as suggested in the title of this reply to commentaries.

The principal contrasts that Jagiello et al. highlight are among many cultural transmission biases we now know of. I suggest they are also reflected more widely in social learning decisions among nonhuman animal cultures governing whether cultural innovations spread, or are instead over-ridden by immigrants' conformity in their new group. Such conformity may serve either informational or social-integrative functions.