Behavioural variation in 172 small-scale societies indicates that social learning is the main mode of human adaptation.

ABSTRACT: The behavioural variation among human societies is vast and unmatched in the animal world. It is unclear whether this variation is due to variation in the ecological environment or to differences in cultural traditions. Underlying this debate is a more fundamental question: is the richness of humans' behavioural repertoire due to non-cultural mechanisms, such as causal reasoning, inventiveness, reaction norms, trial-and-error learning and evoked culture, or is it due to the population-level dynamics of cultural transmission? Here, we measure the relative contribution of environment and cultural history in explaining the behavioural variation of 172 Native American tribes at the time of European contact. We find that the effect of cultural history is typically larger than that of environmen

SUBMITTER: Mathew S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4590464 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature