ABSTRACT
Every day, people utter sentences that have never been said before and do things that have never been done in quite the same way, both producing and responding to a social world of bewildering complexity. Yet, we can discover (dynamic) patterns in this complexity and can find explanations for them. The words that people use in their sentences and most else of what they know they learned from or with the help of others, who in turn learned from others, who learned from others, eventually connecting all humans who ever lived in one giant sociocultural network. The origins of this network date back to our human ancestors, even before they spoke language.
