Abstract
In order to understand the different patterns of cultural change in modern and archaic humans, I propose a new model of cultural evolution. I show that when we consider one isolated population, cultural evolutionary speed increases when individuals have higher creativity to explore cultural traits more widely, accurately judge the utility of cultural traits (strong direct bias), do not strongly rely on the population mean, increase the exploration range according to the variety of socially learned cultural traits (condition dependent exploration), and make smaller errors in social learning. The number of exemplars, population size, relatedness (similarity) of cultural traits in exemplars, and one-to-many (teacher) transmission have little effect on cultural evolutionary speed provided population size is large. Next, I study the effect of cultural interactions between modern and archaic humans. I show that the different patterns of cultural change in Africa, Europe, and Asia around 20,000–200,000 years ago can be explained by differences in dispersal processes of modern humans among the regions. Cultural interaction sometimes functions as a rotten apple and sometimes provides a negative exemplar of how not to behave.
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Nakahashi, W. (2013). A Mathematical Model of Cultural Interactions Between Modern and Archaic Humans. In: Akazawa, T., Nishiaki, Y., Aoki, K. (eds) Dynamics of Learning in Neanderthals and Modern Humans Volume 1. Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans Series. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54511-8_17
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