Charles Perreault: UCLA Department of Anthropology

Humans adaptive radiation has been explained by our capacity to socially learn information (culture). Culture is an inheritance system that parallels and interacts with the genetic one. Cultural variation and innovations accumulate in a population throughout time, allowing for complex cultural adaptations to evolve. Since, it is assumed, cultural evolution occurs faster on average than biological evolution, humans can adapt to new ecosystems more rapidly than other animals. The assumption that cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution, however, has never been empirically tested. In this talk I will suggest that human technologies typically change more rapidly than animal morphologies. Like biological evolution, rates of cultural evolution are inversely correlated with the time interval over which they are measured. This correlation explains in part why the pace of change in technologies appears faster when measured over recent time intervals, where taphonomic intervals are often shorter.