Preprint submitted for Learning Strategies and Cultural Evolution during the Paleolithic, edited by Kenichi Aoki and

Alex Mesoudi. Please inform the authors about any citations prior to its print appearance. Abstract Cultural transmission models are coming to the fore in explaining in-creases in the Paleolithic toolkit richness and diversity. During the later Paleolithic, technologies increase not only in terms of diversity but also in their complexity and interdependence. As Mesoudi and O’Brien (2008) have shown, selection broadly fa-vors social learning of information that is hierarchical and structured, and multiple studies have demonstrated that teaching within a social learning environment can increase fitness. We believe that teaching also provides the scaffolding for transmis-sion of more complex cultural traits. Here, we introduce an extension of the Axelrod Axelrod (1997) model of cultural differentiation in which traits have prerequisite relationships, and where social learning is dependent upon the ordering of those prerequisites. We examine the resulting structure of cultural repertoires as learning environments range from largely unstructured imitation, to structured teaching of necessary prerequisites, and we find that in combination with individual learning and innovation, high probabilities of teaching prerequisites leads to richer cultural repertoires. Our results point to ways in which we can build more comprehensive explanations of the archaeological record of the Paleolithic as well as other cases of technological change