Quasi-Darwinian mechanisms

There is a remarkable change in the human archaeological record of the Late Pleistocene. It is one of ecological and geographic expansion, increased innovation rates and the replacement of other hominin taxa by our species. The dominant explanation of this pattern appeals to cumulative cultural evolution, with a variant of natural selection operating on culturally rather than genetically inherited traits. This paper argues that Darwinian cultural evolution is one of a family of mechanisms through which change in trait distribution in one generation shapes trait distribution in the next, and that this whole family of mechanisms contributes to the Late Pleistocene pattern. This fact helps explain otherwise anomalous features of the archaeological and ethnographic record.