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Cited by 1,066Language and cultural evolutionPleistocene-Era Hominins and ArchaeologyAustralian Indigenous Culture and History

Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses—The Tasmanian Case

Henrich, Joseph·2004·American Antiquity
DOI 10.2307/4128416
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Abstract

A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers, and boomerangs. To address this puzzle, and the more general question of how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution and maladaptive losses of culturally acquired skills, this paper constructs a formal model of cultural evolution rooted in the cognitive details of human social learning and inference. The analytical results specify the conditions for differing rates of adaptive cultural evolution, and reveal regimes that will produce maladaptive losses of particular kinds of skills and related technologies. More specifically, the results suggest that the relatively sudden reduction in the effective population size (the size of the interacting pool of social learners) that occurred with the rising ocean levels at the end of the last glacial epoch, which cut Tasmania off from the rest of Australia for the ensuing ten millennia, could have initiated a cultural evolutionary process that (1) kept stable or even improved relatively simple technological skills, and (2) produced an increasing deterioration of more complex skills leading to the complete disappearance of some technologies and practices. This pattern is consistent with the empirical record in Tasmania. Beyond this case, I speculate on the applicability of the model to understanding the variability in rates of adaptive cultural evolution.

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  • In humans, social learning tends to be imperfect, meaning transmission events are associated with a risk of losing cultural information.

    “In humans, social learning tends to be imperfect, which means that transmission events are associated with a risk of losing cultural information.”

    From Machine culture (2023) · cites this paper as [73]

  • The stability of cultural information strongly depends on both the size of the population that shares information and the type of social learning mechanisms involved.

    “Theoretical and empirical studies of cultural evolution have shown that the stability of cultural information strongly depends on both the size of the population that shares information 73 and the type of social learning mechanisms involved (with lower fidelity when transmission relies on mere observation than when it relies on verbal teaching, for instance) 80 .”

    From Machine culture (2023) · cites this paper as [73]

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Authors
Henrich, J.
Affiliations
Emory University (US)
Corresponding author
Henrich, Joseph
ORCID
Henrich, Joseph
Venue
American Antiquity
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2004-04
Volume
69
Issue
2
Pages
197-214
ISSN
  • 0002-7316 (ISSN-L)
  • 2325-5064
DOI
10.2307/4128416
OpenAlex
W2330349018
Cited by
1,066
References
60
Citations by year
2026: 52 · 2025: 44 · 2024: 58 · 2023: 68 · 2022: 73 · 2021: 72 · 2020: 63 · 2019: 80 · 2018: 53 · 2017: 50 · 2016: 67 · 2015: 54 · 2014: 66 · 2013: 54 · 2012: 53
FWCI
282.81
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 4677 d)
Locations
American Antiquity (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Australian Indigenous Culture and History
Keywords
cultural evolution, Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Holocene, social learning, social learning model, effective population size, technological losses, human cognition, social interaction, bone tools, boomerang, hunter-gatherers

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