Mere Recurrence and Cumulative Culture at the Margins

The consensus formulation of cumulative culture characterizes cumulative traditions as information transmitted by high-fidelity learning that generates incremental improvement over time. While this formulation is effective for studying paradigmatic cases (e.g. Holocene-era hominin toolkits), it is less so at capturing and explaining putative cases at the margins—for instance, some recurrent behaviors observed in social animal species. This paper argues against the consensus formulation in favor of a minimal one, which links cumulative culture to what we call ‘copying know-how’ and the transmission of trait form. As we argue, these elements are better able to characterize putative instance of marginal cumulative culture. Yet by rejecting incremental improvement, the minimal formulation raises a tricky empirical problem we call ‘mere recurrence’: distinguishing cumulative culture from other processes that sustain recurrent behavior. We highlight three broad types of processes that generate mere recurrence, distinguishing them from copying know-how. Finally, we put the assembled conceptual tools to use in a case study, distinguishing the accounts of cultural epidemiologists from those working on the zone of latent solutions—arguing against those that have tried to align the two