Many researchers assume that until 10–12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile,
relatively egalitarian bands. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” suffuses the social sciences. It …

Our species has the peculiar ability to accumulate cultural innovations over multiple
generations, a phenomenon termed 'cumulative cultural evolution'(CCE). Recent years have …

Control of fire is one of the most important technological innovations within the evolution of
humankind. The archaeological signal of fire use becomes very visible from around 400,000 …

Cooperation beyond familial and group boundaries is core to the functioning of human
societies, yet its evolution remains unclear. To address this, we examined grooming …

Human between-group interactions are highly variable, ranging from violent to tolerant and
affiliative. Tolerance between groups is linked to our unique capacity for large-scale …

Various studies have investigated cognitive mechanisms underlying culture in humans and
other great apes. However, the adaptive reasons for the evolution of uniquely sophisticated …

Neanderthals hunted and butchered straight-tusked elephants, the largest terrestrial
mammals of the Pleistocene, in a lake landscape on the North European plain, 125,000 …

Humans regularly solve complex problems in cooperative teams. A wide range of
mechanisms have been identified that improve the quality of solutions achieved by those …

Social Archaeology and Material Worlds aims to forefront dynamic and cutting-edge social
approaches to archaeology. It brings together volumes about past people, social and …

The dominant view of cumulative technological culture suggests that high-fidelity
transmission rests upon a high-fidelity copying ability, which allows individuals to reproduce …