A long view of cumulative technological culture.
Michael J O'BrienR Alexander BentleyPublished in: The Behavioral and brain sciences (2020)
We agree that the emergence of cumulative technological culture was tied to nonsocial cognitive skills, namely, technical-reasoning skills, which allowed humans to constantly acquire and improve information. Our concern is with a reading of the history of cumulative technological culture that is based largely on modern experiments in simulated settings and less on phenomena crucial to the long-term dynamics of cultural evolution.