ABSTRACT
Phylogenetic studies of material culture are gaining popularity in the anthropological sciences and are giving us new insights into the transmission of human culture in the past and present. The authors use computer simulation to assess the effects of different forms of cultural transmission on cultural phylogenies and evaluate these concepts to a dataset comprising projectile points from the Great Basin of North America. However, the simulations define a simple transmission system with enough detail to directly observe how the mechanisms of transmission affect phylogenetic reconstruction. In reality, individuals probably employ many mechanisms at once, even for the same traits, but the authors's aim is to illustrate the consequences of the transmission mechanism on phylogenetic reconstruction, so we keep the simulations simple. In this study, the authors's interest is in determining how well phylogenetic analyses are able to reconstruct an inheritance tree when traits are transmitted under the three systems of inheritance.
