The Secret of Our Success

The reason Franklin’s men could not survive is that humans don’t adapt to novel environments the way other animals do or by using our individual intelligence. None of the 105 big brains figured out how to use driftwood, which was available on King William Island’s west coast where they camped, to make the recurve composite bows, which the Inuit use

Suppose we took you and forty-nine of your coworkers and pitted you in a game of Survivor against a troop of fifty capuchin monkeys from Costa Rica. We would parachute both primate teams into the remote tropical forests of central Africa. After two years, we would return and count the survivors on each team. The team with the most survivors wins. O

learners automatically and unconsciously imitate their chosen models, including by matching their speech patterns

There is ample evidence from psychological experiments—going back forty years—that both children and adults preferentially interact with, and learn from, same-sex models over opposite-sex models. In young children, these biases emerge even before they develop a gender identity and influence their learning from parents, teachers, peers, strangers, a

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

This imaginary ancestral primate crossed a crucial evolutionary threshold as it entered a regime of cumulative cultural evolution. This threshold is the point at which culturally transmitted information begins to accumulate over generations, such that tools and know-how get increasingly better fit to the local environments—this is the “ratchet effe

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

After transporting what looked like a dead, charred log to her distant garden, I saw a Matsigenka woman breathe life back into a hidden ember using a combination of dried moss, which she brought with her, and thermal reflection from other logs. I was also embarrassed when another young Matsigenka woman, with the requisite infant slung at her side,

Making fire is so “unnatural” and technically difficult that some foraging populations have actually lost the ability to make fire. These include the Andaman Islanders (off the coast of Malaysia), Sirionó (Amazonia), Northern Aché, and perhaps Tasmanians. Now, to be clear, these populations couldn’t have survived without fire; they retained fire bu