The cultural evolution of symbolic culture

Many tools that we use to think and communicate — letters, numbers, calendars, artistic forms, and other symbols — have a cultural history. They evolved by being transmitted from one mind to another, then another, and this process was shaped by cognitive constraints, some symbols being easier to learn than others. Cognitive science and cultural evolution make predictions about the structure of cultural symbols, which can be tested in two main ways. First, cultural evolution can be modeled and these models can be tested against historical or anthropological data. Second, we can design experiments to reproduce, in the lab, mechanisms that could have played a role in the history of symbols.