Abstract

Human culture changes over time and varies across space. Two main approaches to study cultural evolution have developed in the last fifty years: human behavioural ecology and a suite of perspectives centred on the role of cultural transmission. The latter are often confusingly referred to with the name of the phenomenon they are trying to explain, ‘cultural evolution’. We argue that this is unhelpful and is generating confusion, as evident in the assertion that human behavioural ecology disregards cultural evolution. The aim of behavioural ecology is to explain human behaviours, and the vast majority of them are at least to some extent cultural. In addition, culture forms part of the ecology that determines the costs and benefits associated with adopting a behaviour. Thus, human behavioural ecologists have studied cultural evolution from the very beginning, even though they have not focussed on social learning. We explore three examples in detail: kinship systems, religious institutions, and witchcraft belief. We then use the framework offered by Tinbergen’s [1963, Z Tierpsychol, 20(4), 410–433] four evolutionary questions about behaviour to explain how human behavioural ecology and cultural transmission approaches can complement each other. Moreover, we discuss several difficulties with cultural transmission approaches and highlight how the human behavioural ecological view of cultural evolution sometimes diverges from them. We conclude by suggesting that the field can move forward and achieve greater synthesis by exploring how selective processes acting on biological fitness differ from those acting on cultural fitness – and how the two might interact in the cultural evolution of human behaviours.