From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

Humans present evolutionary science with an unusual challenge. We possess characteristics rarely seen elsewhere in nature, and in some cases apparently unique in their degree: complex language, ...

In Part One of this series, we saw that culture doesn't suffer from the problem that Darwin's theory of natural selection successfully solved: the problem of how change accumulates in biological ...

What is culture? If you search for the meaning of this word, you will most likely come across a list. For example, you might learn that culture consists of the art, clothing, cuisine, language, skills ...

Tool-assisted foraging may have been the impetus for the earliest beginning of the evolution of cumulative culture. Early hominins, 3.4 to 2 million years ago, likely relied on foraging strategies ...

Each of us individually is the accumulated product of thousands of generations that have come before us in an unbroken line. Our culture and technology today are also the result of thousands of years ...

Whether it is folk songs, lullabies, or ballads, music has been transmitted orally for countless human generations. In the largest ever cultural transmission study on the evolution of music, an ...

Evolution has been a cornerstone of the biological sciences for the better part of a century. Rarely, however, has evolutionary science been considered valuable in understanding contemporary human ...

The killer whale on boat “violence” doesn’t seem to be going away. Last week, an orca (Orcinus orca) reportedly launched itself into a yacht off the coast of the North Sea. The event, which wasn’t ...