The origin and evolution of cultures

1: The evolution of social learning

Social learning and adaptation

Why does culture increase human adaptability?

Why culture is common, but cultural evolution is rare

Climate, culture, and the evolution of cognition

Norms and bounded rationality

2: Ethnic groups and markers

The evolution of ethnic markers

Shared norms and the evolution of ethnic markers / with Richard McElreath

3: Human cooperation, reciprocity, and group selection

The evolution of reciprocity in sizable groups

Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups

Why people punish defector: weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas / with Joseph Henrich

Can group-functional behaviors evolve by cultural group selection? an empirical test / with Joseph Soltis

Group-beneficial norms can spread rapidly in a structured population

The evolution of altruistic punishment / with Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles

Cultural evolution of human cooperation / with Joseph Henrich

4: Archaeology and culture history

How microevolutionary processes give rise to history

Are cultural phylogenies possible? / with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, William H. Durham

Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? a climate change hypothesis / with Robert L. Bettinger

5: Links to other disciplines

Rationality, imitation, and tradition

Simple models of complex phenomena: the case of cultural evolution

Memes: universal acid or a better mousetrap?