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 s...

In this document, we describe techniques and approaches concerned with social-web archive contextualization. In particular, we describe our work on cultural dynamics, which refers to gaining insights into cultural patterns in social media, context-aware social search, and social media mining. We examine the reaction of people in social media to news articles, by developing techniques that could...

The World Bank, in its operational Policy 4.10, uses the term “indigenous peoples” to refer to a distinct, vulnerable, social and cultural group possessing the following characteristics in varying degrees: (a) Self-identification as members of a distinct indigenous cultural group and recognition of this identity by others; (b) collective attachment to geographically distinct habitats or ancestr...

This paper is about the alleged tension between methodological individualism and evolutionary ideas in the work of Friedrich Hayek. This issue is much debated, but I focus my attention on a quite original incompatibility argument by Geoffrey Hodgson. Hodgson sympathizes with the evolutionary Hayek, arguing that Hayek’s methodological individualism involves an “ontogenetic” approach to social sc...

This paper explores childhood social learning among Aka and Bofi hunter-gatherers in Central Africa. Existing literature suggests that hunter-gatherer social learning is primarily vertical (parent-to-child) and that teaching is rare. We use behavioural observations, open-ended and semi-structured interviews, and informal and anecdotal observations to examine the modes (e.g. vertical versus hori...

Multilevel societies, containing hierarchically nested social levels, are remarkable social structures whose origins are unclear. The social relationships of sperm whales are organized in a multilevel society with an upper level composed of clans of individuals communicating using similar patterns of clicks (codas). Using agent-based models informed by an 18-year empirical study, we show that c...