Three accounts of the cognitive abilities that facilitated the emergence and transmission of cumulative culture in the recent hominin lineage

Henrich, Heyes and Tomasello on the Cognitive Foundations of Cultural Evolution. Cecilia Heyes. September 13 2021. To appear in: The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution, Eds. Rachel Kendal, Jamie Tehrani & Jeremy Kendal. https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ascch/Celia's%20pdfs/Heyes%20&%20Moore%20AAC%20pdf.pdf

Abstract: We give a brief overview of three accounts of the cognitive abilities that facilitated the emergence and transmission of cumulative culture in the recent hominin lineage. These accounts were developed by Joseph Henrich (e.g., 2015), Cecilia Heyes (e.g., 2018), and Michael Tomasello (e.g., 1999, 2008, 2014) in collaboration with others. We pay particular attention to the different abilities that these authors think are foundational to human cultural evolution, and to questions about whether these abilities first arose as products of genetic or cultural evolution. Our hope is that by clarifying the similarities and differences between these accounts, we will identify points of disagreement that could be tested empirically, and areas where further conceptual clarification is required.

Keywords: cultural evolution, cultural learning, human cognition, adaptations, Henrich, Heyes, Tomasello