Culture: The Driving Force of Human Cognition

It is often, though sometimes only implicitly, assumed that biological/genetic evolution sets neural substrates, that neural substrates fix cognitive abilities, and that cognitive abilities determine the spectrum of cultural practices exhibited by a biological species. We label this view as the “bottom‐up‐only” view. In this paper we will show that such a “chain of dependence” is much looser than usually assumed, especially as far as recent periods (the last 800,000 years vs. the last 7 million years or more) are considered. We will provide evidence and arguments supporting the idea that cultural innovation may have direct and ascertainable effects both on the cognitive capabilities of populations of hominins (via what we call “cultural exaptation”) and on the neural substrates of the individuals in those populations (via what we call “cultural neural reuse”). Together, cultural exaptation and cultural neural reuse may give raise to a plausible general mechanism for cognitive evolution in which culture is the driving force, thus offering a “top‐down‐also” view of human evolution. An overview on archaeological evidence, provided by Colagè and d’Errico, reveals that the timing, location, and pace of cultural innovations are more consistent with scenarios that take culture, rather than genetic evolutionary processes, as the key driving force for human cognition. The authors elaborate on those mechanisms by which cultural evolution operates, with a specific focus on cultural exaptation and cultural neural reuse.