Demography and Cultural Evolution How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses—the Tasmanian Case

A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers and boomerangs. To address this puzzle, and the more general question of how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution and maladaptive losses of culturally acquired skills, this paper constructs a formal model of cultural evolution rooted in the cognitive details of human social learning and inference. The analytical results specify the conditions for differing rates of adaptive cultural evolution, which reveal regimes that will produce maladaptive losses of particular kinds of skills and related technologies. More specifically, the results suggest that the relatively sudden reduction in the effective population size (the size of the interacting pool of social learners) that occurred with the rising ocean levels at the end of the last glacial epoch, which cut Tasmania off from the rest of Australia for the ensuing ten millennia, could have initiated a cultural evolutionary process that (1) kept stable or even improved relatively simple technological skills, and (2) produced an increasing deterioration of more complex skills leading to the complete disappearance of some technologies and practices. This pattern is consistent with the empirical record in Tasmania. Beyond this case, I speculate on the applicability of the model to understanding the variability in rates of adaptive cultural evolution. 4 This paper presents a model of cumulative cultural evolution that explicitly links certain cognitive aspects of cultural learning with social group characteristics (e.g., size, density, interconnectedness). My goal is to provide some general theoretical insights that show how our cognitive capacities for social learning (i.e., cultural transmission), which likely evolved via natural selection for their ability to extract adaptive information from the social environment (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Henrich and Gil-White 2001), generate varying rates of cultural/technological evolution, including regimes of technological loss or maladaptive change. 1 As a case example, I will apply predictions derived from the formal model to illuminate some of the curious aspects of Tasmanian cultural evolution observed from the beginning of the Holocene to the arrival of Europeans. Below, I first describe the Tasmanian case, and then develop a fairly general analytical model of cultural evolution, …