Japan

Modern human culture relies on copying of behavioural forms beholden to past cultural evolution. It remains debated whether such ‘action copying’ underlies any wild ape culture. It is unclear whether this ability was present in the last common ancestor or whether it first appeared after their divergence. Evidence of untrained apes spontaneously copying novel action forms, under controlled conditions, would favour the ‘copying hypothesis’, this data is lacking. Given that majority influence appears to affect ape social learning, we hypothesised that the dearth of evidence, in untrained apes, could be due to a lack of majority demonstrations in research. If evidence were found, in such a population, this would lend credence to the argument that wild apes and even the last common ancestor, had the capacity to spontaneously copy novel actions. Here, we performed the first controlled, action copying study that incorporated majority-bias with untrained non-human great apes (all species; n=19). Our results show a total lack of copying ability, all untrained mother-reared apes failed to copy, or approximate, the demonstrated action forms, despite majority demonstrations. Our findings reinforce the view that apes do not spontaneously copy action forms - not even majority demonstrations changed this empirically-grounded picture. Our finding also adds to increasing evidence that wild ape cultures are never, or very rarely, based on action form copying. This also means that action form copying likely arrived in the human lineage - after the divergence from the last common ancestor.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

Can apes ape? What about with the addition of biases?

### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

### Schedule and Program

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/12285eb22580949635121d15d5b46325.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/abstracts.pdf)

**Program-at-glance**

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/c0d0d4c8fcdad49d12631574fd966ae8.png)

### About the conference 
 
**Help-desk:** 
Please first visit [Help-desk](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk) where you can find the instructions and manuals for exploring the conference site. 

**Plenary sessions:**
Five leading researchers give a live talk. It is like a TV show. The audience can submit a question from the chat window. Chat messages are immediately delivered to speakers and moderators.

**Q&A sessions (parallel):**
Each presenter first gives a 2-minute live lightning talk followed by an 8-minute live discussion with the audience. It uses Zoom.

**Discussion sessions:** 
The audience can approach presenters and discuss their research. The sessions are held in a dedicated room in Gathertown.
 
**Gathertown:**
It is a platform dedicated to live virtual interactions.
Gather Town is available for all participants 24 hours during the conference.
You can meet and talk with anybody at a lounge or at a table in Gathertown.
Further Gather Town instruction and how to use short keys please find in our [Help desk page](https://underline.io/events/120/help-desk). 

**Videos and slides:**

* Plenary sessions and the Q&A sessions will be recorded and uploaded after the sessions.
* All the videos and slides are available for 60 days after the conference but only to registered ones. 

**Text-based chatting with the speakers:** 
You can chat with any speaker in the Q&A and discussion sessions. A chat window is available on each speaker’s page, and you can leave your questions there. 

**Announcement to the other participants:**
If you want to make an announcement to the other participants (e.g., “Hey, let’s meet at the lounge in Gathertown from 9pm CEST!), please use twitter (#CESConf2021).



### Code of conduct

See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
&nbsp; 
 CES is dedicated to providing a welcoming and harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality, or the presence of or care for dependents. 
We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.

&nbsp;
**Harassment can occur in-person or virtually, and includes, but is not limited to:**
* Comments (verbal, text, etc.) that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, nationality
* Sexual images in public spaces (physical or virtual)
* Deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following
* Harassing photography or recording (including sharing of presentation materials without consent)
* Sustained disruption of talks or other events (including “Zoombombing”)
* Inappropriate physical contact or unwelcome sexual attention
* Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behaviour 

&nbsp;
 **Inclusiveness Committee**:
&nbsp;
 To facilitate implementing the code of conduct and foster a climate of inclusion, we have developed an inclusiveness committee. Below is their contact information:
 **Hiromi Matsumae**:	matsumae.hiromi.g@tokai.ac.jp
 **Patrick Savage**:	psavage@sfc.keio.ac.jp
 **Sarah Mathew**:	Sarah.Mathew@asu.edu
 **Gmail:** inclusivenessCES2021@gmail.com
 See [more details about reporting the harassment.](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/)

### Organizing committee

**Honorary Conference Organizer:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home) 

**Chair:** [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io)

**Scientific Committee:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home), [Yasuo Ihara (the University of Tokyo)](https://researchmap.jp/read0209180?lang=en), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Naoko Matsumoto (Okayama University)](https://researchmap.jp/nmatsumoto_okayama-u), [Masako Myowa (Kyoto University)](https://myowa.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en), [Hisashi Nakao (Nanzan University)](https://www.hisashinakao.com/), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)

**Local Organizing Committee:** [Yutaka Horita (Teikyo University)](https://sites.google.com/site/yhoritapage/), [Masanori Takezawa (Hokkaido University)](https://lalalarakko.github.io/), [Ayaka Takimoto (Hokkaido University)](https://lynx.let.hokudai.ac.jp/~takimoto/), [Kohei Tamura (Tohoku University)](https://researchmap.jp/7000017854)

**Inclusiveness Committee:** [Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University)](https://www.sarahmathew.net/), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)


![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/967110a00d200a6b20d6f4fa6556ba13.png)

For attending the conference, you first need to register and pay fees from [the link here](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/registration/). After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site. After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site

Registration fee

technical paper

Gossip is essential to sustaining cooperation through indirect reciprocity, but it is unclear if and how individuals obtain accurate information through gossip. We examine how information acquired through hearsay influences cooperative decisions in warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized semi-nomadic pastoral population in Kenya. The Turkana engage in cattle raids against neighboring groups in which there is a substantial risk of injury or death. Using vignettes and surveys with 63 Turkana warriors, we obtained information regarding warriors' ratings of the qualities of other warriors, norms about information sharing over different social scales (from kin level to the cultural group at large), the level of consensus in reputation, and real-world instances of decision making in warfare based on gossip. The results indicate that 1) a warrior’s reputation is associated with altruistic bravery, leadership, and combat skill; 2) there are norms regulating sharing other warrior’s reputations; and 3) warriors actively assess reputation when determining who to cooperate with. The findings suggest norms may play a role in making gossip sufficiently accurate, thus facilitating indirect reciprocity as a mechanism of human cooperation.

How gossip and reputation shape high-stakes cooperative decisions among Turkana warriors

This work analyzes the evolutionary diversification of the lanceolate points of the South Central Andes focusing on the pace and the patterns of this evolutionary radiation. Through phylogenetic reconstruction and by analyzing the time series of innovation, extinction, and taxonomic diversity we show that the divergence process began around 9500 cal BP and extended to 5000 cal BP. We distinguish a first instance with a greater diversity of points, a higher rate of innovation and less class longevity. These trends progressively stabilized, giving rise to an inverse pattern of less innovation, decreasing taxa diversity and greater class longevity. Also, we documented a progressive reduction in the length and the increase in the width of the points. We suggest that the adoption of new prey hunting tactics, since the end of the early Holocene, and the evolution of new weapon systems gave rise to an adaptive environment that favored the selective evolution of innovations in projectile points to fill different technological niches. The adaptive radiation of the lanceolate points contributed to more diverse weaponry that increased the chances of successful hunting in a greater diversity of contexts, allowing humans to specialize in camelid hunting.

Evolutionary Radiation of Mid-holocene Lanceolate Points From the Highlands of the South Central Andes

Angelica and sorrel salad? Ethnobotanical, historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence for Viking-Age plant use

The paper attempts to contribute to an ongoing debate in the cognitive science of religion and cultural evolution concerning factors responsible for the emergence of moralizing religions. Scholars propose either social complexity or economic prosperity as the key forces in these cultural processes and often refer to the religious history of the ancient Mediterranean in their arguments. In this paper, we mainly explore the so called Affluence Hypothesis, which suggests that the emergence of moralizing religions was caused by shifts in life-history strategies in response to the increase in economic prosperity. We evaluate this hypothesis by analyzing economic, demographic and religious dynamics of the ancient Mediterranean. In particular, we employ the methods of Distributional Semantic Modeling to analyze temporal trends in moralizing religions motifs in a large corpus of ancient Greek texts and compare these trends with the dynamics of social complexity and economic prosperity as captured by various archaeological proxies.

Social Complexity, Affluence, and the Emergence of Moralizing Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean

Obtaining reliable, musically interpretable representations of sound in standardized notation is essential for cross-cultural analysis of the cultural evolution of music. However, musical transcription is usually conducted manually by ear, which is time-consuming and subjective, and its reliability for non-Western songs is largely unknown. In this study, we examine the reliability of 3 human and 10 automated transcriptions of 32 song excerpts from diverse cultures around the world taken from the Natural History of Song dataset (Mehr et al. 2019) and the Cantometrics songs dataset (theglobaljukebox.org; cf. Wood et al., this conference). The degree of agreement is evaluated by comparing pairs of human-human and human-machine transcriptions. We found that human transcription can be sufficiently reliable (κ ~.6-.9, ~80-90% agreement), but current state-of-the-art automated methods are not (κ <.4, <60% agreement). No automated method clearly outperformed others. As the agreement between human transcriptions could reach much higher agreement than the pairs of human and machine transcriptions, there is still room for improvement in developing the computational tools for analyzing the pitch structure of traditional music. Reliable automatic music transcription methods can broaden the scope of cross-cultural analysis of music, which is challenging to tackle with conventional manual transcription. Establishing objective, reliable methods for cross-cultural music transcription is critical for diversifying studies of the cultural evolution of music.

Reliability of Human and Automated Transcriptions of Global Songs


Musical scales, defined as a set of discrete pitches from which melodies are constructed, are one of the most universal features of music. Some important analogies can be drawn between the evolution of scales and biological evolution: they both entail evolution of a linear sequence of discrete units; their study is focused on extant species; they exhibit large variations in mutation rates (e.g. vocal scales vs. metallophone scales). In comparison to the seemingly infinite space of biological sequences, however, the space of possible scales (typically 7 or fewer notes, just-noticeable-differences of at least ~5 cents) is comparatively tiny; and little is known the relative effects of drift and selection in scales. Despite these properties of scales, quantitative studies of the evolution of scales are scant.

To study of the evolution of scales, we first create a sample of extant scales, by scouring the ethnomusicological literature of the last century to assemble a cross-cultural database of scales. This allows us to first consider the ‘drift’ forces inherent due to imperfections in both vocal production, and pitch perception. We then consider a set of selection biases, and test which hypotheses may best predict the distributions of extant scales. Finally, we think about how the different forces (physical, perceptual, cultural) involved in drift and selection, in comparison to biological evolution, may vary considerably across populations and histories in what sometimes may appear an arbitrary fashion.

Evolution of musical scales

Variation is the universal: Making cultural evolution work in developmental psychology

Overimitation is defined by a tendency to copy all actions executed by a model, even the clearly irrelevant ones. The motivational mechanisms and functionality of overimitation are still not well understood, but its possible adaptive meaning could be related to causal opacity of a great part of socially learned behaviors. This phenomenon has been widely replicated in several contexts and has been observed in the behavior of children over 2 years of age and even in adults. Studies have shown that overimitation is sensitive to some characteristics of the model observed such as age, familiarity, proficiency, and reputation. Our work intended to investigate the effect of information about the competence of an adult model on the copying of irrelevant actions by preschool children (5 years old) in a task. We tested the influence of self-declared information about the model competence and of the same kind of information given by third parties in a conversation about the model. Our results reveal no effect of both ‘‘self-declared competence” and ‘‘reputation” biases on overimitation. We discuss that this result may have occurred because other information available to participants, and not manipulated by us, was used to infer model competence such as the model’s age and success in the task directly observed by the participants. Another potential explanation is that children use a ‘‘copy all, correct later” strategy in a context where only one model is available.

Biases on social learning: the effect of model's competence on children's overimitation

Living in a social group confers an individual many advantages, one being the possibility to obtain relevant information from others. However, one must be able to discriminate what is useful. For instance, human and non-human primates must know who and what to learn from. Here, we investigated the opportunities to obtain visual information from the face of others, which we call VAF (Visual Access to Faces) in a wild population of capuchin monkeys from Brazil. We looked at four infants, aged two and nine months old and aimed at testing the hypothesis that both the identity of the individual the infants were having VAF from and the infants’ age influenced the duration of these opportunities to obtaining information from others’ faces. We looked at 323 VAF events (mean=2.539 seconds±0.489). We used a GLMM (infants as a random factor) including duration of VAFs as dependent variable and individual with whom the VAF occurred and month (2nd or 9th) as fixed factors. We found that the identity of the other monkey was not significant, neither its interaction with month. However, month alone was significant (p=0.016), with a higher mean for the 2nd (3.296±0.653) than the 9th (1.415±0.560) month. From these results it appears that whom the infant is looking at is not relevant, however "when", if earlier or later in infancy, is critical for the acquisition of this sort of social information. That is, accessing and processing this type of visual information provided by faces may be an initial social development pattern. 

Keywords: Sapajus libidinosus, social behaviour, social cognition, social regulation, visual processing 

Funding: Fapesp

Looking at others’ faces may be more important in early infancy

Humans have adapted well to diverse environments in part because of their ability to efficiently acquire information from their social environment. However, we still know very little as to how young children acquire cultural knowledge, and in particular the circumstances under which children prioritize social over asocial learning. In this study we ask whether children will selectively adopt either a majority-biased or a payoff-biased social learning strategy in the presence or absence of asocial learning. Three- to 5-year-old children (n = 117) were first shown a video in which four other children took turns in retrieving a capsule housing a reward from one of two boxes. Three of the children (the ‘majority’) retrieved a capsule from the same box and a single individual (the ‘minority’) retrieved a capsule from the alternative box. Across four conditions we manipulated both the value of the rewards available in each box (equal or unequal payoff), and whether children had knowledge of the payoff before making their own selection. Results show that children adopted a majority-biased learning strategy when they were unaware of the value of the rewards available, but adopted a payoff-biased strategy when the payoff was known to be unequal. We conclude that children are strategic social learners who use both social and asocial learning to maximize personal gain.

Premium content

Can apes ape? What about with the addition of biases?

Downloads

Next from Cultural Evolution Society 2021

How gossip and reputation shape high-stakes cooperative decisions among Turkana warriors

Similar lecture

Looking at others’ faces may be more important in early infancy