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Cultural skill and language: How structuration affects cultural evolution.

Wataru Nakahashi1

  • 1Faculty of Social Sciences, Waseda University, Nishi-Waseda 1-6-1, Shinjuku, Tokyo 169-8050, Japan.

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|March 31, 2019
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Human cultural evolution is complex. Structuration ability, the capacity to merge and divide units, impacts skill acquisition, potentially increasing complexity if skills are learned in parallel, but inhibiting it under certain conditions.

Keywords:
Cumulative cultureMergeParallel learningStep-by-step learningTrauma

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Area of Science:

  • Human evolution
  • Cognitive science
  • Archaeology

Background:

  • Complex cultural skills are unique to humans.
  • Human language's complex structure suggests a role for structuration ability.
  • Investigating the archeological emergence of structuration ability requires understanding its effect on cultural evolution.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the emergence of structuration ability archeologically.
  • To determine if structuration ability influences the complexity of maintainable cultural skills.
  • To analyze the impact of learning processes on cultural evolution.

Main Methods:

  • Utilizing mathematical models to simulate cultural evolution.
  • Examining the effect of structuration ability on the difficulty of cultural skills.
  • Considering different learning strategies (sequential vs. parallel) for component skills.
  • Analyzing scenarios where cultural skills impact survival rates.

Main Results:

  • Structuration ability does not increase the maximum difficulty of maintainable cultural skills if component skills are learned sequentially.
  • Maximum difficulty may increase if component skills can be learned in parallel.
  • Under certain conditions, structuration ability can inhibit cultural evolution, particularly when skills affect mortality or injury rates.

Conclusions:

  • The learning process is crucial for understanding the evolution of complex cultural skills.
  • Structured cultural skills play a significant role in shaping cultural evolution.
  • Structuration ability's impact is contingent on learning methods and skill consequences.