At a basic level, cultural evolution is just change over time in a society’s culture. By ‘culture’ we mean all the socially learned information that passes from one generation to the next non-genetically, such as knowledge, attitudes, norms, customs, languages, institutions, beliefs and skills.

However, cultural evolution involves studying cultural change through an evolutionary lens. Cultural evolution researchers typically study one or both of the following:

We are interested in understanding how the capacity for culture evolved in our and other species. This can be done by comparing the cultural capacities of different species, such as their capacities for social learning, imitation, language or theory of mind, to try to understand how and why those capacities evolved. It also involves creating mathematical or computer models of these evolutionary processes, comparing cultures across contemporary human societies, and looking at our species’ past through the archaeological record.