ABSTRACT
The evolutionary approach to human behaviour that has become known as ‘dual inheritance theory’ (eg, Smith, EA 2000) holds that an individual’s actions are jointly shaped by genes, individual learning, and social learning (Pulliam and Dunford 1980; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1990, 1991, 1992; Richerson and Boyd 1992). In this paper we will address two key questions that arise from this approach: (1) To what extent do traditions relating to different cultural practices co-evolve with one another, perhaps as parts of larger co-evolving packages that may include language and gene lineages? (2) Can we distinguish whether particular cultural traditions originate or change as a result of hybridising and mixing processes or branching and splitting processes? As we will see, the two questions are not unconnected.
