Cultural evolution articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    A detailed analysis of male song structure in zebra finches shows how females use particular features of songs as indicators of male quality in species that learn only one song.

    • Danyal Alam
    • , Fayha Zia
    •  & Todd F. Roberts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We gathered genetic data for 1,763 individuals from 147 populations across 14 African countries, and 12 Late Iron Age individuals, to trace the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples over the past 6,000 years.

    • Cesar A. Fortes-Lima
    • , Concetta Burgarella
    •  & Carina M. Schlebusch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Archaeogenetic study of ancient DNA from medieval northwestern Europeans reveals substantial increase of continental northern European ancestry in Britain, suggesting mass migration across the North Sea during the Early Middle Ages.

    • Joscha Gretzinger
    • , Duncan Sayer
    •  & Stephan Schiffels

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A ‘triangulation’ approach combining linguistics, archaeology and genetics suggests that the origin and spread of Transeurasian family of languages can be traced back to early millet farmers in Neolithic North East Asia.

    • Martine Robbeets
    • , Remco Bouckaert
    •  & Chao Ning

  • Article |

    Human populations in the southern Africa interior were collecting non-utilitarian objects at around 105,000 years ago, suggesting that the development of this innovative behaviour did not depend on exploiting coastal resources.

    • Jayne Wilkins
    • , Benjamin J. Schoville
    •  & Amy Hatton

  • Letter |

    In a voter game, information gerrymandering can sway the outcome of the vote towards one party, even when both parties have equal sizes and each player has the same influence; and this effect can be exaggerated by strategically placed zealots or automated bots.

    • Alexander J. Stewart
    • , Mohsen Mosleh
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin

  • Letter |

    Uranium-series dating of rock art from Borneo reveals a minimum date for figurative artwork of 40,000 years ago, and a distinct style of parietal art in Southeast Asia at the Last Glacial Maximum.\

    • M. Aubert
    • , P. Setiawan
    •  & H. E. A. Brand

  • Letter |

    Stone tools and a disarticulated and butchered skeleton of Rhinoceros philippinensis, found in a securely dated stratigraphic context, indicate the presence of an unknown hominin population in the Philippines as early as 709 thousand years ago.

    • T. Ingicco
    • , G. D. van den Bergh
    •  & J. de Vos

  • Letter |

    Analyses of digital corpora of annotated texts reveal the influence of stochastic drift versus selection in grammatical shifts in English and provide a general method for quantitatively testing theories of language change.

    • Mitchell G. Newberry
    • , Christopher A. Ahern
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin

  • Letter |

    Entertaining movies addressing both individual values and marriageability can provide a way to change cultural attitudes towards female genital cutting within certain cultures.

    • Sonja Vogt
    • , Nadia Ahmed Mohmmed Zaid
    •  & Charles Efferson

  • Letter |

    The percentage of human deaths caused by interpersonal violence reflects our membership of a particularly violent clade of mammals, although changes in socio-political organization have led to marked variations in this proportion.

    • José María Gómez
    • , Miguel Verdú
    •  & Marcos Méndez

  • Letter |

    A species-wide study shows that the Hawaiian crow Corvus hawaiiensis is a highly proficient tool user, creating opportunities for comparative studies with tool-using New Caledonian crows and other corvids.

    • Christian Rutz
    • , Barbara C. Klump
    •  & Bryce M. Masuda

  • Letter |

    South America was the last habitable continent to be colonized by humans; using a database of 1,147 archaeological sites and 5,464 radiocarbon dates spanning 14,000 to 2,000 years ago reveals two phases of the population history of the continent—a rapid expansion through the continent at low population sizes for over 8,000 years and then a second phase of sedentary lifestyle and exponential population growth starting around 5,000 years ago.

    • Amy Goldberg
    • , Alexis M. Mychajliw
    •  & Elizabeth A. Hadly

  • Letter |

    Phylogenetic methods were applied to a cross-cultural database of traditional Austronesian societies to test the link between ritual human sacrifice and the origins of social hierarchy—the presence of sacrifice in a society stabilized social stratification and promoted inherited class systems.

    • Joseph Watts
    • , Oliver Sheehan
    •  & Russell D. Gray

  • Letter |

    Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists.

    • Benjamin Grant Purzycki
    • , Coren Apicella
    •  & Joseph Henrich

  • Letter |

    An analysis of when children develop a sense of fairness (receiving less or more than a peer) is compared across seven different societies; aversion to receiving less emerges early in childhood in all societies, whereas aversion to receiving more emerges later in childhood and only in three of the seven societies studied.

    • P. R. Blake
    • , K. McAuliffe
    •  & F. Warneken

  • Letter |

    Wealth inequality and wealth visibility can potentially affect overall levels of cooperation and economic success, and an online experiment was used to test how these factors interact; wealth inequality by itself did not substantially damage overall cooperation or overall wealth, but making wealth levels visible had a detrimental effect on social welfare.

    • Akihiro Nishi
    • , Hirokazu Shirado
    •  & Nicholas A. Christakis

  • Letter |

    According to popular opinion, unethical business practices are common in the financial industry; here, the employees of a large, international bank are shown to behave, on average, honestly in a laboratory game to reveal dishonest behaviour, but when their professional identity as bank employees was rendered salient, the prevalence of dishonest behaviour increased.

    • Alain Cohn
    • , Ernst Fehr
    •  & Michel André Maréchal

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Maxime Derex
    • , Marie-Pauline Beugin
    •  & Michel Raymond

  • Letter |

    A dual-task computer game played by groups of different sizes is used to show that cultural evolution (the maintenance or improvement of cultural knowledge) strongly depends on population size; in larger groups of players, higher cultural complexity and cultural trait diversity are maintained, and improvements to existing cultural traits are more frequent.

    • Maxime Derex
    • , Marie-Pauline Beugin
    •  & Michel Raymond

  • Books & Arts |

    John A. Goldsmith is intrigued by the life of a linguistics giant who felt himself to be a failure.

    • John A. Goldsmith

  • Comment |

    Andrew Robinson pieces together the story of who deserves the credit for deciphering the hieroglyphs.

    • Andrew Robinson

  • Books & Arts |

    Culture is both a product and a driver of human evolution, finds Peter Richerson.

    • Peter Richerson

  • Comment |

    Mark Pagel proposes that our ability to share and build on ideas is what made us human.

    • Mark Pagel

  • News & Views |

    Tracing a common ancestry between languages becomes harder as the connection goes further back in time. A new test has revealed a surprisingly ancient relationship between a central Siberian and a North American language family.

    • Jared Diamond

  • Books & Arts |

    A prescription for how human cooperation evolved will provoke much-needed debate about the origins of society, finds Peter Richerson.

    • Peter Richerson

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