Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

From Mind To Matter: Patterns Of Innovation In The Archaeological Record And The Ecology Of Social Learning, Kathryn Demps, Nicole M. Herzog, Matt Clark

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Archaeology and cultural evolution theory both predict that environmental variation and population size drive the likelihood of inventions (via individual learning) and their conversion to population-wide innovations (via social uptake). We use the case study of the adoption of the bow and arrow in the Great Basin to infer how patterns of cultural variation, invention, and innovation affect investment in new technologies over time and the conditions under which we could predict cultural innovation to occur. Using an agent-based simulation to investigate the conditions that manifest in the innovation of technology, we find the following: (1) increasing ecological variation results …