From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

Think of evolution, and you might think of Darwin's finches and natural selection. But according to researchers writing in the journal BioScience, it is not our genes that are determining our current ...

Recent investigations into primate behaviour have underscored the importance of cultural evolution — the process by which behaviours and skills are socially transmitted and refined over successive ...

Culture is central to defining humanity. Throughout history, many definitions have been proposed to describe what we mean when we talk about culture, leading to considerable confusion. But while ...

In Part One of this series, we saw that culture doesn't suffer from the problem that Darwin's theory of natural selection successfully solved: the problem of how change accumulates in biological ...

Human evolution may no longer be driven primarily by genetics, according to a new theory by researchers at the University of Maine which claims that cultural systems are now shaping the way humans ...

Common pool resources comprise around 65 percent of Earth's surface and vast tracts of the ocean. While examples of successful governance of these resources exist, the circumstances and mechanisms ...

Potters of different cultural backgrounds learn new types differently, producing cultural differences even in the absence of differential cultural evolution. The research has implications for how we ...

A new study challenges the idea that language stems from a single evolutionary root. Instead, it proposes that our ability to communicate evolved through the interaction of biology and culture, and ...

What led humans on the unique path of cultural development? And can we do anything useful with newly reconstructed histories of this process? Culture is central to defining humanity. Throughout ...