The evolution of shared worlds: teaching and the origins of cumulative culture

The emergence of cumulative culture marks a fundamental transformation in the history of human living. Through cultural practices, ways of doing, making, and relating persist across generations and become progressively transformed. Yet culture does not persist because knowledge or representations are transmitted from one individual to another. It persists because human beings participate in recurrent forms of coordination that become part of their histories of living together. In this perspective, we propose teaching as a historically specialized organization of interpersonal coordination that contributes to the conservation of such cultural practices. We understand teaching not as the transfer of information, but as the generation of a domain of consensual coordination in which teacher and learner recursively transform their ways of perceiving and acting together. From this view, cumulative culture is not the accumulation of invariant representations, but the historical stabilization and conservation-through-transformation of viable patterns of participation. Hence, technological artifacts are not repositories of information, but material evidence of repeated patterns of living and coordinating actions together. This shift changes the study of cultural evolution from a focus on high-fidelity transmission to the relational dynamics through which practices are constantly re-enacted. Finally, we propose a multilevel neurodynamic framework in which these relational dynamics are expressed across behavioral, temporal, and neural levels, positioning interbrain coupling as a non-reductive empirical window onto an organism–organism coordination process, thereby offering a novel approach to the evolutionary origins of cumulative culture.