The classification of archaeological assemblages in the Middle Stone Age of South Africa in terms of diversity and temporal continuity has significant implications with respect to recent cultural evolutionary models which propose either gradual accumulation or discontinuous, episodic processes for the emergence and diffusion of cultural traits. We present the results of a systematic technologic...

Goal preferences indicate intentions to achieve or avoid particular states. We examined whether Curacaoan and Dutch students differ in goal preferences related to school and whether goal preferences are associated with students' evaluation of the classroom climate. Measurement invariance of the instruments was also tested between samples. Participants attended vocational high schools in Curacao...

Episodes of population loss and cultural change, including the famous Classic Collapse, punctuated the long course of Maya civilization. In many cases, these downturns in the fortunes of individual sites and entire regions included significant environmental components such as droughts or anthropogenic environmental degradation. Some afflicted areas remained depopulated for long periods, whereas...

The article begins with a short introduction to phenomenology with an emphasis on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose ideas have had a great impact on cultural anthropology since the 1980s, especially through notions like ‘embodiment’ and ‘radical empiricism’. The article will proceed to outline main trends in phenomenological anthropology as well as its precursors. It then dedicates itsel...

The commentators have brought a wealth of new perspectives to the question of how culture evolves. Each of their diverse disciplines--ranging from psychology to biology to anthropology to economics to engineering--has a valuable contribution to make to our understanding of this complex, multifaceted topic. Though the vast majority of their comments were supportive of my approach, it is natural ...

Evolutionary models of cultural change have acquired an important role in attempts to explain the course of human evolution, especially our specialization in knowledge-gathering and intelligent control of environments. In both biological and cultural change, different patterns of explanation become relevant at different 'grains' of analysis and in contexts associated with different explanatory ...

This paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst minds that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and self-reproducing. According to honing theory, minds, like other self-organizing systems, modify their contents and adapt to their environments to minimize entropy....

BACKGROUND Despite a concerted policy effort in Europe, social inequalities in health are a persistent problem. Developing a standardised measure of socioeconomic level across Europe will improve the understanding of the underlying mechanisms and causes of inequalities. This will facilitate developing, implementing and assessing new and more effective policies, and will improve the comparabilit...

In urban environments, anthropogenic noise can interfere with animal communication. Here we study the influence of urban noise on the cultural evolution of bird songs. We studied three adjacent dialects of white-crowned sparrow songs over a 30-year time span. Urban noise, which is louder at low frequencies, increased during our study period and therefore should have created a selection pressure...