How Cultural Transmission Through Objects Impacts Inferences About Cultural Evolution

The cross-fertilisation between biological and cultural evolution has led to an extensive borrowing of key concepts, theories, and statistical methods for studying temporal variation in the frequency of cultural variants. Archaeologists have been among the front-runners of those engaging with this endeavour, and the last 2 decades have seen a number of case studies where modes of social learning were inferred from the changing frequencies of artefacts. Here, we employ a simulation model to review and examine under-discussed assumptions shared by many of these applications on the nature of what constitutes the ‘population’ under study. We specifically ask (1) whether cultural transmission via ‘objects’ (i.e. public manifestations of cultural traits) generates distinct patterns from those expected from direct transmission between individuals and (2) whether basing inference on the frequency of objects rather than on the frequency of mental representations underlying the production of those objects may lead to biased interpretations. Our results show that the rate at which ideational cultural traits are embedded in objects, and shared as such, has a measurable impact on how we infer cultural transmission processes when analysing frequency-based archaeological data. At the same time, when cultural transmission is entirely mediated by the material representation of ideas, we argue that copying error should be interpreted as a two-step process which may occur in either one or both of embedding information in objects and retrieving it from them

How Cultural Transmission Through Objects Impacts Inferences About Cultural Evolution

The cross-fertilisation between biological and cultural evolution has led to an extensive borrowing of key concepts, theories, and statistical methods for studying temporal variation in the frequency of cultural variants. Archaeologists have been among the front-runners of those engaging with this endeavour, and the last 2 decades have seen a number of case studies where modes of social learning were inferred from the changing frequencies of artefacts. Here, we employ a simulation model to review and examine under-discussed assumptions shared by many of these applications on the nature of what constitutes the 'population' under study. We specifically ask (1) whether cultural transmission via 'objects' (i.e. public manifestations of cultural traits) generates distinct patterns from those expected from direct transmission between individuals and (2) whether basing inference on the frequency of objects rather than on the frequency of mental representations underlying the production of those objects may lead to biased interpretations. Our results show that the rate at which ideational cultural traits are embedded in objects, and shared as such, has a measurable impact on how we infer cultural transmission processes when analysing frequency-based archaeological data. At the same time, when cultural transmission is entirely mediated by the material representation of ideas, we argue that copying error should be interpreted as a two-step process which may occur in either one or both of embedding information in objects and retrieving it from them

Experimental evaluation on the applicability of necrobiome analysis in forensic veterinary science

Despite the wide usage of animals as models in forensic studies, the investigations of fundamental legal questions involving domesticated and nondomesticated animals were always given marginal attention compared to "human forensic," and only recently the interest in the discipline is increasing. Our research focuses on the effect of the fur coat on the activity and development of microbial decomposers. In order to test this variable never assessed before, rabbit carcasses were used and results show that: (i) distinct and significant temporal changes in terms of metabolic activity and taxa distribution can be tracked over the decomposition process; (ii) the richness and the diversity of the bacterial communities does not significantly vary over time, but it does not mean that the species Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) do not change; (iii) the presence/absence of the fur on the carcasses does not significantly affect either the bacterial communities' functional activity or the diversity intra- and intercommunity, neither at phylum nor at family resolution; (iv) the functional activity and the ecological diversity of the bacterial communities are significantly affected by the body region, while the relative abundance is not. Obtained data confirm previous observations and provide new insight in the Forensic Veterinary field in terms of equally using them in order to derive a statistical model for the PMI estimation. As a future perspective, a contribution to the Forensic Entomology approach will be given in legal investigations when domestic or wild animals are involved, regardless of the presence of a hair layer