Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.

ABSTRACT: A central question in behavioral and social sciences is understanding to what extent cultural traits are inherited from previous generations, transmitted from adjacent populations or produced in response to changes in socioeconomic and ecological conditions. As quantitative diachronic databases recording the evolution of cultural artifacts over many generations are becoming more common, there is a need for appropriate data-driven methods to approach this question. Here we present a new Bayesian method to infer the dynamics of cultural traits in a diachronic dataset. Our method called Evoked-Transmitted Cultural model (ETC) relies on fitting a latent-state model where a cultural trait is a latent variable which guides the production of the cultural artifacts observed in the database. The dy

SUBMITTER: Hyafil A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8989295 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature