Sociality, trust, kinship and cultural evolution

Abstract

Pre-history human economic development, it will be argued, was the result of significant increases in sociality, that itself was a product of the evolution of a human temperament associated with much more interpersonal tolerance and trust which facilitated kinship recognition and significantly expanded social network size. All this made possible in humans, an ongoing cultural evolutionary processes not seen in other animals. Though our close cousins the chimpanzees and some other animals display forms of culture, there is little evidence of significant ongoing cultural evolution in nonhuman animals. The expansion of human social networks increased the rate of cultural evolution, in part, by increasing the fixation rate of new components of culture.