Japan

I aim to understand variation in an important and relatively historically novel socio-political institution, the Chinese lineage. Notably, extensive geographic variation exists in the historical prominence and relevance of lineages. Using ethnographic and historical-economic evidence, I construct a theory explaining lineages as risk-pooling institutions which provide lineage members with access to land. More so, variation in regional demand for risk-pooling and/or access to land likely stems from well-studied rice-wheat agro-economic differences. I test this hypothesis by examining whether lineage activity is associated with landholding size, precipitation predictability, and historically documented precipitation disasters.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

The Evolution of Chinese LIneages

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SEB Conference 2026

SEB’s Annual Conference is celebrated for creating the perfect composition of research, new discoveries and collaborative connections. Be creative and innovative by exchanging ideas and knowledge with masters of biology from all over the world. 

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### Conference Welcome

Welcome to the third Cultural Evolution Society Conference, CES2021. In the conference, which will be held from June 9-11, 2021, about 180 researchers from East Asia, Oceania, Middle East, Europe, North and South America give presentations on their latest research advancing the evolutionary understanding of human and nonhuman animal culture.

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[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/1ef06ffd05f80957b4a5b685f63ee3ba.png)](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fullprogram.pdf)
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### Code of conduct

See the full details of [the code of conduct](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/code-of-conduct/).
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**Scientific Committee:** [Kenichi Aoki (Meiji University)](https://sites.google.com/site/kenichi1aoki/home), [Yasuo Ihara (the University of Tokyo)](https://researchmap.jp/read0209180?lang=en), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Naoko Matsumoto (Okayama University)](https://researchmap.jp/nmatsumoto_okayama-u), [Masako Myowa (Kyoto University)](https://myowa.educ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en), [Hisashi Nakao (Nanzan University)](https://www.hisashinakao.com/), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)

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**Inclusiveness Committee:** [Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University)](https://www.sarahmathew.net/), [Hiromi Matsumae (Tokai University)](https://sites.google.com/site/hiromimatsumae/eng), [Patrick E. Savage (Keio University)](https://sites.google.com/view/comp-music-lab/home)


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For attending the conference, you first need to register and pay fees from [the link here](https://www.chain.hokudai.ac.jp/CES2020/registration/). After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site. After the payment of the registration fees, you will receive a ticket, which is necessary for accessing the conference site

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The degree of musical diversity within and between societies is a topic of long-standing debate. Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics project made it possible to quantitatively analyse the musical features of cross-cultural societies through 37 standardized musical features (nasality, text repetition, rhythm, tonal blend, etc). The Cantometrics database provides the opportunity to look into the variation in traditional Indian vocal music using these Cantometric features for 207 traditional songs from 32 Indian societies. Principal Component Analysis identifies vocal complexity as the primary factor shaping musical variation in India, consistent with Lomax’s previous findings in global variation. Using the AMOVA (Analyses of Molecular Variance) framework, we find only minor musical differences (~1% to ~5% of variation ) on average between speakers of different language families (Indo-European, Dravidian, and Austro-Asiatic), but greater variation (11% to ~25%) between societies within language families , This supports previous findings of greater diversity within than between societies, and contributes to debates about the evolution of diversity in music and other forms of culture. Our study also highlightshow quantitative analysis can be strengthened by observations from musicians with direct experience of local traditions and applied to local/regional questions in cultural evolution.

Musical diversity within and between societies in India

Prominent theories of the evolution of human musicality have argued for the importance of collective, synchronous music-making, e.g., in social bonding or in advertising coalition strength to other groups (e.g., Savage et al., in press, Mehr et al., in press, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.) Yet these theories have not addressed the fact that there are traditional cultures (including hunter-gatherer groups) where this type of musical behavior is rare or absent, and in which music-making is primarily a solo behavior. Why is collective, synchronous music prominent in some cultures but largely absent in others? We recently offered three hypotheses to account for this variation (Patel & Von Reuden, in press, Behavioral & Brain Sciences): 1) Music-making is less likely to be collective where there is less collective action in general; 2) Music-making is less likely to be collective where it is a principal means of conveying expert knowledge or individual accomplishment; 3) The adoption of certain musical styles (e.g., timbre-based music) can constrain subsequent adoption of collective music-making. We have begun gathering information on cultures that emphasize solo music-making in order to test these hypotheses. This presentation will focus on methodological issues which need to be addressed in coding these data, including the challenge of categorizing different types of collectivity in music-making, as there are numerous types of coordination between individuals during musical activities across traditional cultures.

Accounting for cross-cultural variation in collective music-making: why is music a solo performance in some traditional cultures?

Authority, an institutionalized form of social power, played an essential role in the evolution of large-scale societies during the Holocene. Religious and political authority both have deep histories in human societies, but the nature of their relationship is contested. We purpose-built an ethnographic dataset of 97 Austronesian societies and used phylogenetic methods to address two longstanding questions about the evolution of religious and political authority: firstly how and to what extent these two institutions have co-evolved, and secondly the order in which more differentiated and less differentiated systems of religious and political authority have tended to evolve. We found very strong evidence for mutual interdependence between religious and political authority, as well as evidence against a progression from more differentiated to less differentiated systems of religious and political authority. Our results provide insight into how political and religious authority have worked synergistically to drive the evolution of large-scale societies.

Coevolution of religious and political authority in Austronesian societies

Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did such they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia even in populations with writing and record keeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued that these protocols were not instrumental at all, and that their practitioners were not really endeavoring to employ them in order to bring about rain. Here, taking advantage of the wealth of historical records available in China, we argue to the contrary: that rainmaking is best viewed as an instrumental, means-end activity, and that people have always placed strong emphasis on the outcomes of such activities. To account for persistence of rainmaking, we then present a set of cultural evolutionary explanations, rooted in human psychology, that can explain why people’s adaptive learning processes did not result in the elimination of ineffective rainmaking methods. We suggest that a commitment to a supernatural worldview provides theoretical support for the plausibility of various rainmaking methods, and people often over-estimate the efficacy of the rainmaking technologies because of statistical artefacts (some methods appear effective simply by chance) and under-reporting of disconfirmatory evidence (failures of rainmaking not reported/transmitted).

Magic and empiricism in early Chinese rainmaking: A cultural evolutionary analysis

Despite advances in the study of non-human animal tool behaviour, the sources of tool-use behaviours are still debated. Often, different social and individual learning variants are assumed to play a role in behaviour acquisition. However, without the use of experimental controls, it is impossible to pinpoint which type of learning is responsible for the behaviour in question. We argue that this issue should be addressed with recourse to experimental approaches rooted in classic ethology. Building on the pioneering work by the founders of Ethology (e.g., Nikolaas Tinberg and Konrad Lorenz), we suggest that baseline experiments must be carried out before conclusions can be drawn on the role of any type of learning mechanism in the acquisition of behaviours. For example, we carried out a baseline study on the mechanisms behind nut-cracking in orangutans. We tested 12 naïve, captive, unenculturated orangutans, across two testing institutions (Leipzig: Pongo abelii; Mage=20.3; age range=10-34; 4F; Zürich: 6 Pongo abelii and two Pongo pygmaeus; Mage=14; age range =2-30; 5F). The subjects were provided with the materials necessary for nut-cracking, and no demonstrations and/or training beforehand. Out of the twelve orangutans, at least four individuals, one from Leipzig and three from Zürich, spontaneously expressed nut-cracking with a wooden hammer in the baseline. These results suggest that the behavioural form of nut-cracking can emerge in orangutans through individual learning and non-copying social learning mechanisms.

What would classic Ethologists do? Examining the source of nut-cracking with naïve, unenculturated orangutans (Pongo abelii & Pongo pygmaeus)

Customary tool use by wild tufted capuchin monkeys seems to constitute behavioral traditions, i.e., to be individually acquired by socially biased learning. Social influences apparently involve attentional/motivational effects (“stimulus enhancement”), rather than imitative learning. Persistent manipulation increases opportunities for trial-and-error learning. This process can take a long time, but once proficiently successful in a given context, the use of a type of tool can be quickly generalized to new problems. The use of percussive stone tools is common in savanna populations of tufted capuchins, and where tool material is abundant, as in Serra da Capivara, can be quite diversified. This is also the only wild population where customary use of probe tools has been observed. When exposed to molasses-filled problem-boxes, after brief (unsuccessful) attempts to break them with stone “hammers”, several males quickly succeeded in using twig probes to access the molasses through the top holes. Almost three years later, when exposed to a different Plexiglas problem-box, they promptly brought some twigs. In an experiment on the innovation and diffusion of probe tools’ use in a semi-free group, after the slow and partial diffusion of probing a molasses’ problem-box, the successful individuals quickly succeeded in extracting seeds from another box, even though the probing technique involved was different (pushing). Afterwards, a distinct sort of problem-box also elicited probing attempts. Tool use generalization can facilitate the establishing of behavioral traditions not only by increasing direct individual rewards, but also by enhancing the opportunities for socially biased learning by naïve, tolerated observers.

Tool use generalization and behavioral traditions in tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp)

Humans live in complex niches where survival and reproduction are conditional on the acquisition of knowledge. The rate at which individual knowledge is acquired depends on many factors, both physical and behavioral, such as the frequency of learning opportunities. Here, we developed a series of Bayesian latent-knowledge models to estimate individual knowledge, and to infer the influence of age, as well as the physical and social environment on such knowledge. We fit these novel latent-knowledge models using a set of interviews with 94 children of different ages (4-26 years of age) on the Island of Pemba, Zanzibar, focusing on their knowledge of the local environment, such as animals and plants, in a population in which many children forage for natural resources. Preliminary results indicate that—compared to previous studies—our latent-knowledge models facilitate a far clearer picture of the intrinsic and extrinsic dynamics underpinning individual knowledge acquisition, and the life history of cultural knowledge more broadly.

Development of knowledge of the environment in a population of child part-time foragers

The twentieth century saw two modes of thinking spread through biological systematics: population thinking and tree thinking. Many archaeologists investigating ancient technologies have adopted the population thinking approach for archaeological systematics, as evident from the rise of work on quantifiable, attribute-based patterns of diversity in studies of past technological systems, much of it driven by application of geometric morphometrics. Yet, tree thinking, as one of the central concepts of phylogenetic biology, remains rare in the archaeological sciences. We review some of the obstacles that have impeded the uptake of this concept by archaeologists. Some of these are conceptual, but we identify one specific methodological obstacle: the prevailing use of discrete character traits in phylogenetic analysis in many fields. This is a major challenge for archaeological applications where standardised trait-analytical protocols are scarce. To address this challenge, we present a case study that demonstrates a Bayesian framework for inferring phylogenies using continuous traits derived from artefact shape coefficients obtained via outline based geometric morphometrics. We use a previously published sample of Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age arrowheads from Northwestern Europe to demonstrate the efficacy and accessibility of our approach. We also sketch out the potential for phylogenetic comparative methods to address archaeological questions.

Bayesian inference of technological phylogenies using continuous traits from the archaeological record

The fertility decline associated with economic development has been attributed to a host of inter-related causes, including the rising costs of children with industrialisation, and shifts in family structure. One hypothesis is that kin may impart more pro-natal information within their net-works than non-kin, and that this effect may be exacerbated in networks with high kin-density where greater social conformity would be expected. In this study, we tested these ideas using large personal networks (25 alters) collected from a sample of Dutch women (N = 706). Kin (parents) did not exert more social pressure to have children than non-kin, nor were dense networks associated with greater pressure. Women also reported talking to friends about having children to a greater extent than kin, although here greater kin-density in the network increased the likelihood of women reporting they could talk to kin about having children. Both consanguineal and affinal kin could be asked to help with childcare to a greater extent than friends and other non-kin. Overall, there was no evidence that kin are more likely to offer pro-natal information than non-kin, but they are considered a better source of support in terms of child care.

Do data from large personal networks support cultural evolutionary ideas about kin and fertility?

In indigenous societies, people are categorized into several cultural groups, so-called clans. The clan attribution governs the mating and descent relationships by certain rules. Such rules form various kinship structures. Anthropologists have revealed several classes of kinship structures and corresponding cultural characteristics. Here, we introduce an agent-based model of indigenous societies adopting the multi-level evolution of families and societies. A family is a unit of dynamics and society is an ensemble of families within which the interaction of families can take place. We assign each family a trait and a mate preference as an optimal trait of the bridegroom. Marriage takes place according to the mating preference. Families with similar traits cooperate with each other as well as with mates, whereas those with similar preferences compete for mates. The population of families is increased by such cooperation and declined by competition. With numerical simulations, families were found to form clusters in trait-preference space under a certain condition. Families in the same cluster are united by cultural similarity. Marriage occurs only between families from different clusters. Such clusters can be regarded as clans. Kinship structures emerge as the marriage and descent relationships of such clans. The emergent structures depend on environmental conditions such as the necessity of cooperation and strength of mating competition. Finally, by analyzing the global ethnographic database, called Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, we empirically verify the theoretical results on the environmental dependence of kinship structures.

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