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The interplay between age structure and cultural transmission.
Anne Kandler1, Laurel Fogarty1, Folgert Karsdorp2
1TICE lab, Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Plos Computational Biology
|July 13, 2023
Summary
Population age structure significantly impacts cultural transmission. Our model shows age constraints create distinct cultural compositions, affecting data analysis and requiring new inference methods for accurate insights.
Area of Science:
- Evolutionary anthropology
- Computational social science
- Population genetics
Background:
- Human cultural transmission is influenced by population age structure.
- Unbiased cultural transmission models often overlook age-related effects.
- Understanding age structure's role is crucial for accurate cultural data analysis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore how population age structure shapes cultural composition during unbiased transmission.
- To investigate the interplay between age structure and cultural transmission with age-limited role models.
- To develop methods for inferring age structure and transmission dynamics from cultural data.
Main Methods:
- Development of an age-structured cultural transmission model.
- Comparison of cultural compositions in age-structured versus non-age-structured populations.
- Application of generative inference and machine learning techniques.
Main Results:
- Age-structured and non-age-structured populations show similar cultural compositions under unbiased transmission with large copy pools.
- Age constraints lead to significant differences in cultural compositions.
- Rejections of neutrality tests are only indicative of biased transmission if age constraints are known to be absent.
Conclusions:
- Age structure and its interaction with transmission significantly impact cultural data analysis.
- Generative inference can potentially infer age structure and transmission characteristics simultaneously.
- Population-level data at a single time point has inherent limitations for inference.
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