From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

Think of evolution, and you might think of Darwin's finches and natural selection. But according to researchers writing in the journal BioScience, it is not our genes that are determining our current ...

Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, ...

It is a basic understanding in anthropology that the course of human evolution differs fundamentally from that of other animals due to its heavy reliance on cultural rather than biological adaptation.

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift — driven not by genes, but by culture. In a paper published in the Oxford ...

A new study illuminates the cultural evolution that took place approximately 50,000 to 40,000 years ago, coinciding with the dispersals of Homo sapiens across Eurasia. The insights gleaned from their ...

My last blog, and the one before it, explored how leaving a legacy, whether it be a biological legacy—by having children—or a cultural legacy—through ideas and actions—may impact one’s sense of ...

In Part One of this series, we saw that culture doesn't suffer from the problem that Darwin's theory of natural selection successfully solved: the problem of how change accumulates in biological ...

Common pool resources comprise around 65 percent of Earth's surface and vast tracts of the ocean. While examples of successful governance of these resources exist, the circumstances and mechanisms ...

Central features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental problems like climate change, says a recent study led by the University of Maine. Humans have come to ...