Learning and cognition have become increasingly important components of archeology – our discipline – as researchers have begun to integrate cultural evolutionary theory as a framework for explaining the archeological record (Shennan Reference Shennan2008; Stout et al. Reference Stout, Rogers, Jaeggi and Semaw2019). Significant strides have been conducted over the past two decades in understanding how the results of small-scale evolutionary processes, when taken in the aggregate, can create population-level patterns seen in the record of human origins and spread, first out of Africa and across Europe and Asia (Bae et al. Reference Bae, Douka and Petraglia2017), then eventually into Australia (Clarkson et al. Reference Clarkson, Jacobs, Marwick, Fullagar, Wallis, Smith, Roberts, Hayes, Lowe, Carah, Florin, McNeil, Cox, Arnold, Hua, Huntley, Brand, Manne, Fairbairn, Shulmeister, Lyly, Salinas, Page, Connell, Park, Norman, Murphy and Pardoe2017), and finally, within the last 15,000 years, into the Americas (O'Brien Reference O'Brien2019). Fundamental to this framework has been an emphasis on two kinds of learning, social and individual (O'Brien & Buchanan Reference O'Brien and Buchanan2017). Certain conditions, perceived or real, dictate which type of learning might be more useful in any particular situation (Mesoudi Reference Mesoudi2008; Reference Mesoudi, O'Brien and Shennan2010).

Many animals have the ability to learn socially (Brown & Laland Reference Brown and Laland2003; Heyes & Galef Reference Heyes and Galef1996; Hoppitt & Laland Reference Hoppitt and Laland2013; Watson et al. Reference Watson, Botting, Whiten, van de Waal, Di Paolo, Di Vincenzo and De Petrillo2018; Whitehead & Rendell Reference Whitehead and Rendell2015; Whiten & van de Waal Reference Whiten and van de Waal2017), but because of their extremely high phenotypic plasticity, humans have the unique and highly useful ability to learn from others exactly how and when to learn from others – what Mesoudi et al. (Reference Mesoudi, Chang, Dall and Thornton2016) refer to as “the social learning of social learning.” We see the outcome of this ability manifest in the archeological record as cultural traditions (Willey & Phillips Reference Willey and Phillips1958) – temporal continuity represented by persistent configurations in single technologies or other systems of related forms that result from cultural transmission.

Osiurak and Reynaud (O&R) argue that the cognitive mechanisms underlying individual and social learning are insufficient for explaining the emergence of cumulative technological culture and that it originated in nonsocial cognitive skills, namely, technical-reasoning skills that allowed humans to constantly acquire and improve information. We do not think this view is particularly controversial, and in fact, we think they are probably correct, although we would argue that this revised assumption in no way allows us to ignore the social dimension and to redirect our focus to the nonsocial, strictly technical dimension. Rather, our principle concern is with a reading of the history of cumulative technological culture that is based largely on modern experiments in simulated settings. In prehistory, a population comprised people who lived in a region, with a full demographic distribution of ages and kinship relationships, and, most importantly, millennia of shared ancestral history of cohabitation, cooperation, specialization, migration, reproduction, adaptation, cultural selection, and sorting.

These phenomena are crucial to the long-term dynamics of cumulative cultural evolution. In many of the experiments reviewed by O&R, only a tiny aspect of these dynamics – momentary social learning in a very specific experiment – is represented, and in an unnatural setting. Consider, for example, the vast difference between an undergraduate psychology student spending two minutes studying a paper airplane built in 5 minutes by another undergraduate student versus a Paleolithic boy learning how to knap stone tools over his entire childhood on a daily basis, in a range of different settings. The boy learns repeatedly by observing a parent and other kin members, young and old, all of whom are replicating a tradition that evolved over centuries and millennia of intergenerational transmission.

This type of behavior is difficult if not impossible to replicate in an experiment, so at the very least experimenters need to carefully consider many questions to gain any insight on cumulative culture. For psychologists and evolutionists to reconcile their scales of analysis, they need to ask: What was the context of this learning? How different is learning by studying a paper plane for two minutes versus regular, repeated practice over years of childhood, of a task that was fundamentally embedded in kin relationships, survival, and relationship with the environment? What was the significance of learning repeatedly from different generations of kin for all those years? What other knowledge had to be learned at the same time? Even as we consider all these factors in one generation and one individual, we need to iterate this day-in-day-out process for dozens or even hundreds of generations, cumulatively thousands of people, all of whom were influenced by other cultural evolution factors.

These are the real details of the “evolution” part of cumulative cultural evolution (Mesoudi & Thornton Reference Mesoudi and Thornton2018). Yes, a transmission-chain experiment can be designed to include elements of variation and transmission and selection of sorts, but it might nevertheless be highly contrived by the experiment design. What aspects of evolutionary success would these short-term, laboratory measures miss regarding, say, the evolution of prehistoric projectile points or fishing hooks over many centuries? The differences between real-technological evolution and psychology experiments include many things, including the success of intergenerational transmission and success across multiple tasks.

We do not negate the usefulness of the kinds of micro-society paradigms discussed by O&R for understanding the role of cognitive skills and/or the quality of social transmission under certain conditions. In fact, similar to other archeologists (e.g., Schillinger et al. Reference Schillinger, Mesoudi and Lycett2014), we have conducted such experiments ourselves to better understand certain learning processes that left particular signatures in the archeological record (Atkinson et al. Reference Atkinson, O'Brien and Mesoudi2012; Mesoudi & O'Brien Reference Mesoudi and O'Brien2008). However, we agree with Caldwell et al. (Reference Caldwell, Atkinson, Blakey, Dunstone, Kean, Mackintosh, Renner and Wilks2019, p. 12) that “empirical investigation has been impeded by the methodological difficulty of studying a population-level phenomenon using [only] experimental methods.”

In summary, it no longer is productive simply to substitute the word “population” for a group of students, “culture” for a momentary, contrived task learned in an experiment, or “generation” for passing the task to the next student. None of this is trivial or just semantic; rather, it is crucial to the process of cumulative cultural evolution. We suspect that the next significant breakthrough in understanding cumulative culture will need to directly address multiple issues, including the effect of lifelong learning within a kin group, multigenerational transmission over centuries of human adaptation, and realistic demography. This must be done critically through theory, model, and experiment (Mesoudi & Whiten Reference Mesoudi and Whiten2008).