This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Evolution, which has in recent years matured into an increasingly diverse and wide-reaching but intellectually coherent research programme. The book showcases the disciplinary spectrum of research into Cultural Evolution, from primatology and medieval literature to gene-culture co-evolution, computer science, anthropology, archaeology, and experimental psychology.
The handbook consists of review essays contributed by leading experts in their areas, structured into ten sections covering key approaches and debates, major themes and real-world applications. Taken together, the essays offer an exceptionally broad and forward-looking perspective on the field for researchers across the cognitive and evolutionary social sciences, including those working in fields adjacent to Cultural Evolution, such as Behavioural Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology and Digital Humanities. The handbook also provides a unique educational resource for students and teachers seeking to integrate Cultural Evolution into undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, as well as highlighting some of the potential applications of Cultural Evolution in fields such as education, public health, and environmental policy.
This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Evolution, which has in recent years matured into an increasingly diverse and wide-reaching but intellectually coherent research programme.
Introduction
1: Joshua Conrad Jackson & Juliet Dunstone: The history of cultural
evolution: reflections from leading figures in the field
Approaches to Cultural Evolution
2: Laurel Fogarty & Anne Kandler: Modelling cultural transmission
3: Alex Bentley, Simon Carrington, & Damian Ruck: Modelling drift and
selection in cultural evolution
4: Fredrik Jansson, Andrew Buskell, & Magnus Enquist: Cultural systems
5: Alex Mesoudi: Experimental investigation of cultural evolution
6: Dietrich Stout & Erin Hecht: Evolutionary neuroscience of cultural
evolution
7: Mike O'Brien: Evolutionary archaeology
8: Ruth Mace & Hanzhi May Zhang: Cross-Cultural Comparative Methods for
Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses
9: Helena Miton: Cultural attraction
10: Tim Lewens: Philosophy of cultural evolution
Innovation & social Learning: the foundations of cultural evolution
11: Bruce Rawlings & Simon Reader: What is innovation?
12: Will Hoppitt & Sonja Wild: What is social learning?
13: Michelle Kline: Teaching
14: Christine Caldwell: What is cumulative cultural evolution?
15: Rachel Kendal & Robin Watson: When is social learning adaptive?
16: Edwin van Leeuwen & Tom Morgan: Conformist social learning
17: Matt Offord, Charlotte Brand, & Jeremy Kendal: Prestige biased social
learning
18: Cecilia Heyes & Richard Moore: The cognitive foundations of culture
19: Daphna Buschbaum & Rebekah Gelpi: Life history of social learning
tendencies in humans
20: Dan Haun, Kari Neldner, & Roman Stengelin: Cultural variation in
childhood social learning
21: Kim Sterelny: Cultural Intelligence
Animal Cultures
22: Caroline Schuppli & Emma Lokuciejewski: What constitutes nonhuman culture
and how is it studied?
23: Andy Whiten: Culture in the great apes
24: Erica van de Waal & Charlotte Canteloup: Culture in monkeys
25: Ellen Garland & Luke Rendell: Culture in cetaceans
26: Alex Thornton & Josh Arbon: Culture in mammals
27: Lucy Aplin: Culture in birds
28: Culum Brown: Culture in fish
29: Etienne Danchin, Guillaume Isabel, & Sabine Nöbel: Culture in insects
30: Lara Wood, Gill Vale, Emma Flynn, & Bruce Rawlings: Cross species
comparisons of human and nonhuman culture Approaches, discoveries,
limitations, and future directions
31: Thibaud Gruber: Anthropogenic effects on animal cultures
Technology
32: Maxime Derex & Tom Morgan: Cultural transmission of technological skills
33: Claudio Tennie: Tools and culture among early hominins
34: Anna Prentiss: Lithic technological evolution
35: Salva Duran-Nebreda & Sergi Valverde: The Natural Evolution of Computing
36: Alberto Acerbi: Digital Culture
Arts and Literature
37: Jamie Tehrani: The Cultural Transmission and Evolution of Folk
Narratives
38: Chris Buckley: Craft Traditions
39: Mason Youngblood, Yuto Ozaki & Pat Savage: Cultural Evolution and Music
40: Jan Verpooten: Signalling and the Cultural Evolution of Art
41: Christopher Howe & Heather Windram: Manuscript Traditions
42: Oleg Sobchuk: Modern literature and film
Religion
43: Aiyana Willard, Hugh Turpin & Adam Baimel: Universal Cognitive Biases as
the Basis for Supernatural Beliefs: Evidence and Critiques
44: Theiss Bendixen, Aaron Lightner & Ben Purzycki: The Cultural Evolution of
Religion and Cooperation
45: Joseph Watts: The Cultural Macroevolution of Religion
46: Harvey Whitehouse: The Role of Ritual in the Evolution of Social
Complexity
47: Kirsten A. Lesage, Maliki E. Ghossainy, Rebekah A. Richert , & Kathleen
Corriveau: Social learning and religion
Sociality
48: Tom Currie & Cedric Perret: The Cultural Evolution of Sociopolitical
Organization: Examining how evolutionary processes acting at different scales
have shaped history>'s broadest patterns
49: Quentin Atkinson & Luke Matthews: Cultural evolution and the economic
wealth of nations
50: Adrian Bell: The influence of migration on cultural evolution
51: Heidi Colleran & Yi-Ta Lu: Fertility transition
52: John Bunce & Richard McElreath: Ethnicity
Language and Communication
53: Rachael Bailes & Christine Cuskley: The cultural evolution of language
54: Limor Raviv & Simon Kirby: Self-domestication and the evolution of
language
55: Simon Greenhill: Language phylogenies
56: Yoolim Kim & Olivier Morin: Evolution of writing scripts
Gene culture coevolution
57: Kevin Lala, Marc Feldman, & John Odling Smee: Dialectics that sweep away
Jamshid Tehrani is an anthropologist specialising in the transmission and transformation of culture across generations. He trained in social anthropology at the London School of Economics and subsequently earned a Master's degree in Human Evolution and Behaviour from University College London. He completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2005 at UCL, focusing on the transmission of craft traditions among Iranian tribal groups. Tehrani joined Durham University in 2007, becoming a Chair in Anthropology in 2020 and serving as Head of Department from 2022 - 2025. His current research primarily investigates the dissemination of popular narratives, including folktales, urban legends, and conspiracy theories.
Rachel Kendal is an evolutionary anthropologist specialising in cultural evolution. She trained in Zoology and Psychology at Nottingham University and completed a PhD in Zoology (2003) at Cambridge University, focusing on innovation and social learning in monkeys and fish. She joined Durham University in 2007, becoming Chair in 2020. Recently, she served as President of the Cultural Evolution Society and led the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Her current research concerns learning strategies across species, their potential contribution to the evolution of human, and non-human culture and their potential application to societal issues such as conservation and public health.
Jeremy Kendal is an anthropologist specialising in cultural evolution. He trained in biology at the Nottingham University and subsequently earned a Master's degree in Biological Computation from the University of York. He completed his Ph.D. in Zoology in 2003 at Cambridge University, focusing on the adaptive value of social learning, combining mathematical modelling with experiments using guppy fish. Kendal joined Durham University in 2007. His current research concerns epistemology, memory, cultural transmission and disease emergence
