Behavioral Modernity and the Cultural Transmission of Structured Information: The Semantic Axelrod Model

TL;DR

This paper extends the Axelrod model to include prerequisite relationships in cultural traits, demonstrating that structured teaching enhances the richness of cultural repertoires, providing insights into Paleolithic technological evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extension of the Axelrod model incorporating trait prerequisites and examines how structured teaching influences cultural complexity.

Findings

Structured teaching increases cultural repertoire richness.

Prerequisite-based learning promotes technological complexity.

Higher teaching probabilities lead to more diverse cultural traits.

Abstract

Cultural transmission models are coming to the fore in explaining increases in the Paleolithic toolkit richness and diversity. During the later Paleolithic, technologies increase not only in terms of diversity but also in their complexity and interdependence. As Mesoudi and O'Brien (2008) have shown, selection broadly favors social learning of information that is hierarchical and structured, and multiple studies have demonstrated that teaching within a social learning environment can increase fitness. We believe that teaching also provides the scaffolding for transmission of more complex cultural traits. Here, we introduce an extension of the Axelrod (1997} model of cultural differentiation in which traits have prerequisite relationships, and where social learning is dependent upon the ordering of those prerequisites. We examine the resulting structure of cultural repertoires as learning environments range from largely unstructured imitation, to structured teaching of necessary prerequisites, and we find that in combination with individual learning and innovation, high probabilities of teaching prerequisites leads to richer cultural repertoires. Our results point to ways in which we can build more comprehensive explanations of the archaeological record of the Paleolithic as well as other cases of technological change.