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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. Subscribe to our newsletter for the ...

Think of evolution, and you might think of Darwin’s finches and natural selection. But according to researchers writing in the journal BioScience, it is not our genes that are determining our current ...

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 ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift — driven not by genes, but by culture. In a paper published in the Oxford ...

Artificial intelligence can develop solutions that humans would be unlikely to discover on their own. But what happens when machines do more than solve individual problems and actually discover ...

Your smartphone probably matters more for your survival than your DNA. That’s the startling implication of new research suggesting humans are in the midst of a fundamental evolutionary shift, with ...

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 ...

It’s widely accepted conventional wisdom that when it comes to creative works—TV shows, films, music, books—consumers crave an optimal balance between novelty and familiarity. What we choose to ...