Reexploring drivers of technological variation through the complex landscapes of cultural evolution

Despite a number of issues in its collation, the dataset published by Oswalt et al. (1976) remains a key resource for operationalising cross-cultural technological variability and understanding the socioecological drivers of cultural change in small-scale societies. At the same time, however, it has not been comprehensively explored using up-to-date contextual metrics of subsistence, climate, and demographic structure in each population. In this paper, we present a novel evolutionary framework for understanding technological change in both modern and past populations, according to the complex fitness landscapes of cultural evolution present in different environments. We then use this framework as a lens to explore the drivers of toolkit composition and complexity among hunter-gatherer populations to assess how they relate to the adoption of particular behavioural strategies. We suggest a hierarchy of interlinked influences on the nature of technology: resource distributions exert the most proximate influence on their character, but demography (especially the size of seasonally-aggregated groups) and climate (especially seasonality and inter-annual predictability) are themselves critical in constraining technological possibilities. Finally, we argue that landscape knowledge is crucial in driving access over time to the highest-return technological strategies that are possible in any given environmental context.