We agree with Chater and Christiansen’s account of cultural complexity as emerging through local, path-dependent processes of “social tinkering,” in which practices are iteratively modified rather than centrally designed. Their framework provides a powerful explanation of how large-scale cultural organization can arise without global planning. We believe this account can be further extended and sharpened by specifying both (i) a minimal cognitive prerequisite for the origin of cumulative cultural evolution and (ii) a simple, formally explicit account of how interacting cultural elements stabilize into coherent cultural systems. Across both extensions, we adopt a minimal-principles perspective: relatively simple mechanisms, when made explicit and combined, can generate the large-scale complexity described in the target article.

First, we suggest that faithful representation and mental manipulation of sequences constitute key cognitive prerequisites for cumulative culture. While many non-human animals exhibit social learning and traditions, there is substantial evidence that they are limited in their ability to represent and recall ordered sequences of stimuli (Ghirlanda, Lind, & Enquist, Reference Ghirlanda, Lind and Enquist2017; Lind et al., Reference Lind, Vinken, Jonsson, Ghirlanda and Enquist2023; Lind et al., Reference Lind, Wartel, Jon-And, Ekström, Vinken and Enquist2025; Reindl et al., Reference Reindl, Seed, Barton, Francis-Costa and Kendal2025). Even in skilled learners with considerable control over vocal production, such as great apes, the absence of combinatorial, speech-like systems seems to reflect constraints on sequence representation rather than on motor abilities (Ekström et al., Reference Ekström, Lind and Jon-And2025a; Lind et al., Reference Lind, Vinken, Jonsson, Ghirlanda and Enquist2023). This limitation has far-reaching consequences. Without the ability to encode and reproduce sequences faithfully, innovations cannot be reliably preserved, recombined, or built upon across generations. As a result, cultural processes remain shallow and fail to accumulate (Lind, Reference Lind, Lind and Jon-Andin press).

Computational models help clarify what changes when this constraint is relaxed. Introducing mechanisms for faithful sequence representation (allowing ordered combinations of elements to be encoded and retrieved) leads to qualitatively different outcomes. While more limited approximate mechanisms perform well in environments lacking sequential structure, they fail to exploit information distributed across sequences. Sequence-based mechanisms, in contrast, can make use of such information, but at substantial learning costs, requiring constrained and flexible representations (Jon-And et al., Reference Jon-And, Jonsson, Lind, Ghirlanda and Enquist2023). Building on this, recent modeling work shows that when agents equipped with such minimal sequence-representation capacities are exposed to structured input, higher-order regularities can emerge gradually, without being pre-specified (Jon-And & Michaud, Reference Jon-And and Michaud2024, Reference Jon-And and Michaud2026). These results illustrate how a minimal change in representational capacity can transform the dynamics of cultural transmission.

From this perspective, sequence representation provides a cognitive substrate that makes cumulative “tinkering” possible in the first place. It enables the faithful transmission of ordered behaviors, the recombination of existing elements into novel structures, and the emergence of hierarchical organization. The proposal that limitations in sequence representation form a bottleneck for non-human cognition synthesizes these findings and highlights their broader implications for the evolutionary transition to human culture (Enquist, Ghirlanda, & Lind, Reference Enquist, Ghirlanda and Lind2023; Lind & Jon-And, Reference Lind and Jon-And2025). Importantly, this approach makes the costs and benefits of sequence representation explicit and formally tractable, providing a principled account of why such a capacity may have evolved uniquely in humans (Jon-And et al., Reference Jon-And, Jonsson, Lind, Ghirlanda and Enquist2023).

Second, the systemic side of social tinkering can be made formally explicit by modeling cultural systems as networks of interacting traits subject to simple local update rules (e.g., Jansson et al., Reference Jansson, Aguilar, Acerbi and Enquist2021). Chater and Christiansen emphasize how cultural elements constrain and support one another, forming structured systems without centralized design. In a cultural-systems framework, such elements evolve not in isolation but as parts of systems in which their persistence depends on compatibility with other elements and where lower-level elements can scaffold and constrain the formation of higher-level structures. Such relations among traits may also be culturally emergent apart from logical, physical, or ecological constraints fixed in advance (Jansson & Hattiangadi, Reference Jansson and Hattiangadi2026).

This applies across levels of organization, from low-level elements such as phonemes in language (Ekström et al., Reference Ekström, Tennie, Moran and Everett2025b) to higher-level systems involving traits such as norms and beliefs (Galesic et al., Reference Galesic, Olsson, Dalege, Van Der Does and Stein2021; Jansson, Reference Jansson, Lind and Jon-Andin press). Interdependencies in such systems can generate stable configurations as well as sudden systemic shifts when local changes propagate through the network (Buskell, Enquist, & Jansson, Reference Buskell, Enquist and Jansson2019; Jansson et al., Reference Jansson, Aguilar, Acerbi and Enquist2021; Jansson, Reference Jansson, Lind and Jon-Andin press). These dynamics provide a minimal and mechanistic account of how distinct yet coherent systems, such as languages, worldviews, and institutional structures, can emerge from decentralized processes.

A key feature of this approach is that existing cultural systems act as local compatibility filters: traits that fit with other traits are more likely to persist and spread, while incompatible traits are filtered out (Jansson et al., Reference Jansson, Aguilar, Acerbi and Enquist2021). This creates path dependence and stability, but also the potential for rapid transformation when constraints shift. Some cultural traits may also be regulatory, reshaping the conditions for later tinkering and transmission, including the culturally acquired “cognitive gadgets” through which people learn and think (Acerbi et al., Reference Acerbi, Enquist and Ghirlanda2009; Enquist et al., Reference Enquist, Jansson, Ghirlanda and Michaud2024; Heyes, Reference Heyes2018). These models capture, in simplified and formal terms, how local interactions between traits and agents give rise to global structure and how existing cultural systems reshape the space of possibilities for later tinkering.

These two extensions – sequence representation and the cultural-systems view – are closely linked. Sequence representation enables the faithful transmission and recombination of cultural elements at the individual level, while system-level interactions determine which combinations persist, stabilize, and scale. Together, they provide a multi-level account, grounded in a complex-systems perspective, in which minimal cognitive assumptions and simple interaction rules are sufficient to generate complex cultural organization (Michaud & Enquist, Reference Michaud, Enquist, Lind and Jon-Andin press).

A central implication of this approach is the value of minimal, explicit modeling. By specifying assumptions clearly, whether about cognitive representations or social interactions, we can test whether they are sufficient to generate the observed cultural phenomena. In this way, complex cultural organization can be understood as emerging from simple mechanisms through bottom-up processes, without invoking rich innate structure or centralized control. This is fully consistent with Chater and Christiansen’s account of social tinkering while adding two complementary principles: the minimal cognitive ingredients required for cumulative culture and the formal interaction principles by which cultural elements become organized into systems.