ABSTRACT
Human symbolic culture constitutes a distinctive, species-universal trait, usually thought
to be the result of our having evolved special cognitive capacities, such as language. Seen
from this vantage point, the flow of influence runs from cognition to culture, in that order,
and the task of evolutionary psychology should be to decide how and when the basic
cognitive foundations of modern culture came into being. According to this doctrine, the
revolutionary brain-culture spiral that characterized hominids must have been driven
primarily at the cognitive level. Thus, cognitive evolution triggers cultural evolution,
which triggers further brain evolution, and so on. This is the conventional meaning of
brain-culture coevolution.
