Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Evolution, which has in recent years matured into an increasingly diverse and wide-reaching but intellectually coherent research programme. The book showcases the disciplinary spectrum of research into Cultural Evolution, from primatology and medieval literature to gene-culture co-evolution, computer science, anthropology, archaeology, and experimental psychology. The handbook consists of review essays contributed by leading experts in their areas, structured into ten sections covering key approaches and debates, major themes and “real-world” applications. Taken together, the essays offer an exceptionally broad and forward-looking perspective on the field for researchers across the cognitive and evolutionary social sciences, including those working in fields adjacent to Cultural Evolution, such as Behavioural Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology and Digital Humanities. The handbook also provides a unique educational resource for students and teachers seeking to integrate Cultural Evolution into undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, as well as highlighting some of the potential applications of Cultural Evolution in fields such as education, public health, and environmental policy.

1 - The history of cultural evolution: reflections from leading figures in the field
2 - Modelling cultural transmission
3 - Modelling drift and selection in cultural evolution
4 - Cultural systems
5 - Experimental investigation of cultural evolution
6 - Evolutionary neuroscience of cultural evolution
7 - Evolutionary archaeology
8 - Cross-Cultural Comparative Methods for Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses
9 - Cultural attraction
10 - Philosophy of cultural evolution
11 - What is innovation?
12 - What is social learning?
13 - Teaching
14 - What is cumulative cultural evolution?
15 - When is social learning adaptive?
16 - Conformist social learning
17 - Prestige biased social learning
18 - The cognitive foundations of culture
19 - Life history of social learning tendencies in humans
20 - Cultural variation in childhood social learning
21 - Cultural Intelligence
22 - What constitutes nonhuman culture and how is it studied?
23 - Culture in the great apes
24 - Culture in monkeys
25 - Culture in cetaceans
26 - Culture in mammals
27 - Culture in birds
28 - Culture in fish
29 - Culture in insects
30 - Cross species comparisons of human and nonhuman culture Approaches, discoveries, limitations, and future directions
31 - Anthropogenic effects on animal cultures
32 - Cultural transmission of technological skills
33 - Tools and culture among early hominins
34 - Lithic technological evolution
35 - The Natural Evolution of Computing
36 - Digital Culture
37 - The Cultural Transmission and Evolution of Folk Narratives
38 - Craft Traditions
39 - Cultural Evolution and Music
40 - Signalling and the Cultural Evolution of Art
41 - Manuscript Traditions
42 - Modern literature and film
43 - Universal Cognitive Biases as the Basis for Supernatural Beliefs: Evidence and Critiques
44 - The Cultural Evolution of Religion and Cooperation
45 - The Cultural Macroevolution of Religion
46 - The Role of Ritual in the Evolution of Social Complexity
47 - Social learning and religion
48 - The Cultural Evolution of Sociopolitical Organization: Examining how evolutionary processes acting at different scales have shaped history’s broadest patterns
49 - Cultural evolution and the economic wealth of nations
50 - The influence of migration on cultural evolution
51 - Fertility transition
52 - Ethnicity
53 - The cultural evolution of language
54 - Self-domestication and the evolution of language 
55 - Language phylogenies
56 - Evolution of writing scripts
57 - Dialectics that sweep away ‘COWDUNG’: The Construction of Evolutionary, Cultural and Scientific Niches 
58 - The cultural niche
59 - Gene-culture coevolution in the cognitive domain 
60 - Cultural evolution and diet
61 - Ancient DNA and cultural evolution
62 - Applied diffusion of innovations and interventions
63 - Cultural Evolution and Population Health Interventions
64 - Cultural evolution of ineffective medicine
65 - Conspiracy theories
66 - Environmental sustainability and climate change
67 - Animal Conservation
68 - Education
69 - Public policy
70 - Integroup relations
71 - Cultural evolution of science

Jamshid Tehrani is an anthropologist specialising in the transmission and transformation of culture across generations. He trained in social anthropology at the London School of Economics and subsequently earned a Master's degree in Human Evolution and Behaviour from University College London. He completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2005 at UCL, focusing on the transmission of craft traditions among Iranian tribal groups. Tehrani joined Durham University in 2007, becoming a Chair in Anthropology in 2020 and serving as Head of Department from 2022 - 2025. His current research primarily investigates the dissemination of popular narratives, including folktales, urban legends, and conspiracy theories. Rachel Kendal is an evolutionary anthropologist specialising in cultural evolution. She trained in Zoology and Psychology at Nottingham University and completed a PhD in Zoology (2003) at Cambridge University, focusing on innovation and social learning in monkeys and fish. She joined Durham University in 2007, becoming Chair in 2020. Recently, she served as President of the Cultural Evolution Society and led the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Her current research concerns learning strategies across species, their potential contribution to the evolution of human, and non-human culture and their potential application to societal issues such as conservation and public health. Jeremy Kendal is an anthropologist specialising in cultural evolution. He trained in biology at the Nottingham University and subsequently earned a Master's degree in Biological Computation from the University of York. He completed his Ph.D. in Zoology in 2003 at Cambridge University, focusing on the adaptive value of social learning, combining mathematical modelling with experiments using guppy fish. Kendal joined Durham University in 2007. His current research concerns epistemology, memory, cultural transmission and disease emergence