ABSTRACT
The social transmission of information is one of the prerequisites of culture. Human cultural processes could not exist unless a capacity for nongenetic communication had evolved first in diverse social species. But how did it evolve? Why did it evolve, and once it had evolved, what were its eventual consequences for human evolution? How did the unusual capacity for transmitting cultural information via cultural inheritance, when added to the general ability of all organisms to transmit genetic information via genetic inheritance, affect the evolution of our hominid ancestors? How does this same capacity affect our lives today? How might it affect our futures?
