Compared to other primates, humans have an unusual digestive system. Starting at the top, our mouths, gapes, lips, and teeth are oddly small, and our lip muscles are weak. Our mouths are the size of a squirrel monkey’s, a species that weighs less than three pounds. Chimpanzees can open their mouths twice as wide as we can and hold substantial amoun

Formal education is, after all, primarily an institution for intensive cultural transmission.

The key to understanding how humans evolved and why we are so different from other animals is to recognize that we are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative.

As individuals go about their business of learning from others in their group, the overall body of cultural information contained and distributed across the minds in the group can improve and accumulate over generations.

although a learner may be able to locate, and sometimes learn from, the most successful or skilled person in his community (say, the best hunter in a foraging band), many young learners will be too inexperienced or ill-equipped to take advantage of the nuances and fine points that distinguish the top hunters. Instead, by focusing on older children,

Rather than opposing “cultural” with “evolutionary” or “biological” explanations, researchers have now developed a rich body of work showing how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptations. Culture, and cultural evolution