An integrated anthropological and linguistic analysis of Creek oratory shows oratory to be part of a ritual cycle which recreates both the fundamental Creek cultural system and the Creek towns, the basic political units of Creek society. 1 Creek individual and group identities are thus defined and integrated into the Creek political system. This paper describes the performative effectiveness of...

We introduce an experimental paradigm for studying the cumulative cultural evolution of language. In doing so we provide the first experimental validation for the idea that cultural transmission can lead to the appearance of design without a designer. Our experiments involve the iterated learning of artificial languages by human participants. We show that languages transmitted culturally evolve...

Linguistic evolution mirrors cultural evolution, of which one of the most decisive steps was the "agricultural revolution" that occurred 11,000 years ago in W. Asia. Traditional comparative historical linguistics becomes inaccurate for time depths greater than, say, 10 kyr. Therefore it is difficult to determine whether decisive events in human prehistory have had an observable impact on human ...

Since the 1500s, Mayan language and glyphic systems have been romanticized by Eurocentric interpretations. In recent years, many anthropological works have perpetuated these myths by presenting inaccurate analyses of Maya linguistics. Rather than showing the Maya as an advance and civilized people, these texts promoted a weak, barbarous Maya who could be easily manipulated by European culture, ...

Accurate reconstruction of prehistoric social organization is important if we are to put together satisfactory multidisciplinary scenarios about, for example, the dispersal of human groups. Such considerations apply in the case of Indo-European and Austronesian, two large-scale language families that are thought to represent Neolithic expansions. Ancestral kinship patterns have mostly been infe...

In customizing the neutral model for language transmission , Reali & Griffiths [1] have added a new, 'Bayesian' learning interpretation to a neutral model that has been used in cultural evolution studies for some time (e.g. [2 –6]). While Reali & Griffiths [1, p. 435] dismiss previous applications of this neutral model as being used merely 'as a metaphor', it has been explored in quantitative d...

Short title: Language from cultural recycling of neural substrates Abstract Cultural evolution has emerged as a key source of explanation for the emergence of complex linguistic structure in the human lineage. In this chapter, we argue that the cultural evolution of language has been shaped by non-linguistic constraints deriving from the human brain. By analogy to reading, novel cortical networ...

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking-perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursiv...

From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-t...

The paper surveys recent research on language evolution, focusing in particular on models of cultural evolution and how they are being developed and tested using agent-based computational simulations and robotic experiments. The key challenges for evolutionary theories of language are outlined and some example results are discussed, highlighting models explaining how linguistic conventions get ...