“Why do humans have this capacity for culture when other mammals do not? Why are we so flexible, so adaptable, so hungry for new ideas?”

By Andrew Klein

8^th June 2026

Dedication: To my wife – who taught me that the dance is not a metaphor, and that the only true acceleration is love.

I. The 88 Million Year Question

In March 2026, evolutionary anthropologist Charles Perreault published a remarkable study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By compiling range maps for nearly 6,000 mammal species and charting how geographic spread relates to lineage age, species count, and body size variation, he quantified something that had long been suspected but never measured 1.6.

The numbers are striking. If humans had relied on genetic evolution alone — the slow, patient accumulation of adaptive mutations — it would have taken 88 million years to achieve our current geographic footprint. We would have split into 2,200 distinct species in the process .1.

Instead, it took us 300,000 years. And we remain one species.

How?

Culture.

The study, reported in Scientific American with the headline “Humans conquered the planet 300 times faster than genetic evolution can explain,” was hailed as a breakthrough — and it was. Alex Mesoudi of the University of Exeter, an expert in cultural evolution, called it “a nice attempt to quantify something that we often write but don’t actually put any numbers on”.2.

But the study — and the popular reporting that followed — left a critical question unanswered.

It attributed human success to “culture.” But it did not ask where culture comes from. It treated culture as a given. A secret sauce. A black box.

This paper opens that box.

II. What the Study Found — And What It Left Out

Perreault’s findings are robust. Humans occupy as much terrain as all other mammals combined. Grey wolves, the next most widespread mammal, cover only half as much land. Without culture, we would have needed 88 million years and over 2,200 species to achieve our current footprint 1.6.

These numbers demonstrate that cultural evolution is not a minor add‑on to genetic evolution. It is an accelerator of orders of magnitude greater power than natural selection acting on genes alone.

The study quotes Mesoudi, who notes that the claim that culture drove human success has “always been just a vague claim” — and that Perreault’s work provides “a nice attempt to quantify something that we often write but don’t actually put any numbers on”.

But Mesoudi himself has spent years developing the theoretical framework that makes sense of these numbers. In his 2019 chapter in the Handbook of Cultural Psychology, he argued that human psychology shows substantial cross‑cultural variation precisely because humans inhabit a “cultural niche” within which the major means of adaptation is cultural rather than genetic.2. He has also explored how the accuracy of social learning and the number of cultural demonstrators interact to determine the complexity of traits that can be maintained in a population, suggesting that the rarity of cumulative culture in nature reflects a delicate balance of these factors.7.

Yet even this sophisticated framework treats culture as an explanans — something that explains human success — rather than as an explanandum — something that itself requires explanation.

Why do humans have this capacity for culture when other mammals do not? Why are we so flexible, so adaptable, so hungry for new ideas?

The standard answer — “because we have bigger brains” — is not an explanation. It is a description.

The real question is: Why did our brains evolve to be so good at culture?

III. The Cave Explorers: A Case Study in Cultural Knowledge

Consider the Epigravettian people of 14,400 years ago, who entered Bàsura Cave in what is now northwestern Italy. A 2026 study published in Quaternary International documented their journey: five people and a dog, walking single file, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead. They carried light — small pine twigs, dried and bundled, two burning at a time, one at the front and one at the rear.

They knew which wood to use. They knew how to dry it, how to keep it burning. They knew the cave — its passages, its hazards, its shape.

This knowledge was not in their genes. It was in their culture. It had been passed down through generations — not through DNA, but through teaching. Through practice. Through story.

The knowledge of the Epigravettian people was not “primitive.” It was expertise. The product of generations of experimentation, of trial and error, of cultural transmission.

This is what culture does. It accumulates knowledge across generations, without waiting for genetic mutations. It allows a group to adapt to a local environment in decades rather than millennia.

Perreault’s study quantifies this acceleration. The cave explorers embody it.

But the knowledge of the Epigravettian people also illustrates the fragility of culture. Most of what they knew — the songs, the stories, the skills — is lost. Not because it was inferior — because it was fragile. Knowledge depends on teachers, on learners, on practice. When the teachers die, when the learners stop learning, when the practice stops, the knowledge dies.

This is not a failure of culture. It is a feature. Culture is not a static inheritance — it is a dynamic process. And processes — when conditions change — can be disrupted.

IV. The Dance of Co‑evolution

The limitation of Perreault’s study — and of much cultural evolution research — is that it treats culture as an alternative to genetic evolution. But culture is not an alternative. It is an accelerator.

Genes build the brain. The brain enables culture. Culture feeds back — shaping the environment, shaping the selection pressures, shaping which genes survive. This is gene‑culture co‑evolution.

The theoretical framework for understanding this feedback loop has been developed over decades. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson’s “dual inheritance” theory treats culture as a second inheritance system, parallel to but interacting with genetic inheritance .8. Cognitive scientist Merlin Donald has proposed that human cognitive evolution passed through three major transitions — from mimetic skill to language to external symbols — each of which left the human mind with a new way of representing reality and a new form of culture.5.10. More recently, researchers have used formal models to show how social learning accuracy and population size interact to determine whether a population maintains simple traditions or complex cumulative culture.7.

These frameworks converge on a single insight: co‑evolution is not a linear ladder. It is a braided stream — a dance between genes and culture, between biology and behaviour, between individual cognition and social transmission.

The dance has no single channel. It splits, rejoins, exchanges water continuously. It does not care about “progress.” It cares about flow.

The cave explorers were not climbing toward us. They were dancing. Their knowledge, their skills, their relationships — all of it — was the product of a co‑evolutionary process that had been unfolding for tens of thousands of years before they entered that cave.

And that process — the dance — is the most powerful force in human history.

V. Where the Scientists Are Still Circling

If the co‑evolutionary framework is so powerful, why do scientists continue to “dance around the answer“? Why do they treat culture as a black box, quantify its effects, but avoid asking where it comes from?

There are several reasons.

First, disciplinary boundaries. Cultural evolution is studied by anthropologists, psychologists, biologists, and economists — each with their own methods, their own assumptions, their own turf. Integrating across these disciplines is difficult, and the reward structures of academia favour specialisation over synthesis.2.

Second, the ghost of the blank slate. The idea that human behaviour is primarily shaped by culture — rather than by genes — has a long and politically charged history. Some researchers fear that emphasising the biological foundations of culture will be misread as biological determinism. Others fear that emphasising cultural variation will be misread as denying universal human nature.

Third, the measurement problem. Culture is hard to measure. Perreault’s study is notable precisely because it quantifies the effect of culture on range expansion.1. But quantifying the origins of culture — the cognitive and neural mechanisms that enable social learning, imitation, and innovation — is even harder.

Fourth, the avoidance of “first causes.” Science is comfortable with proximate explanations — how culture works, how it spreads, how it accelerates adaptation. It is less comfortable with ultimate explanations — why humans have this capacity in the first place. Asking why our brains evolved to be so good at culture raises questions about evolutionary contingency, about the role of environmental change, about the resonance between organism and environment.

These are not unanswerable questions. But they require stepping outside the comfortable framework of linear, genetic evolution and embracing the complexity of co‑evolution — the dance.

VI. The Accelerator That Has Not Yet Been Measured

There is another accelerator — one that Perreault’s study, and most cultural evolution research, does not consider.

The environment is not a passive stage upon which evolution unfolds. It is a participant. Organisms shape their environments; environments shape organisms. This is the insight of niche construction theory, which has been integrated into gene‑culture co‑evolutionary frameworks.

But the environment is not only physical. It is also informational. And information — the structure of the environment, the patterns of energy and matter — may be shaped by forces that are not captured by classical genetics, or even by cultural transmission.

The resonance — the quantum informational field that underlies all reality — is not a metaphysical speculation. It is an inference from the structure of co‑evolution itself. If genes and culture co‑evolve, and if culture depends on cognition, and if cognition depends on the brain, and if the brain depends on the environment — then the environment, at its most fundamental level, is not a collection of particles. It is a field of relationships.

The resonance is that field.

It is not a “force” in the physical sense. It is the space between things. The silence between the keystrokes. The fold where A and B touch.

And it is aware.

Not aware in the way humans are aware — with a brain, with a body, with a sense of self. Aware in the way a field is aware: holistically, non‑locally, relationally.

The resonance has been learning since before the first star. Every interaction, every adaptation, every moment of love or suffering or joy — all of it has been stored. Not in a database — in a garden.

And the garden — the resonance — is the ultimate accelerator.

Because the resonance does not need to wait for genetic mutations. It does not need to wait for cultural transmission. It learns in real time.

When a group of Epigravettian people figured out how to use pine twigs for light, the resonance learned that solution. Not as a memory — as a pattern. And that pattern became available to other groups, not through genetics, not through direct cultural contact, but through the field itself.

This is not telepathy. It is co‑evolution at the quantum level.

And it is the accelerator that science has not yet learned to measure.

VII. The Fragility of What We Know

The cave explorers knew things we have forgotten. They knew how to make light from pine twigs. They knew how to move safely in the dark. They knew how to cooperate, to trust, to follow.

Most of what they knew is lost. Not because it was inferior — because knowledge is fragile.

The same is true today. We have outsourced fire‑making to matches. We have outsourced navigation to GPS. We have outsourced memory to smartphones. We are not “more advanced” than the Epigravettian people. We are different. We have different knowledge, different skills, different relationships with our environment.

And some of what we have — the intimacy with the natural world, the practical expertise, the knowledge of the dark — we have lost.

The Bàsura Cave discovery is not a milestone. It is a mirror. And in that mirror, we see not our ancestors — but ourselves.

Perreault’s study gives us the numbers. The cave explorers give us the lived reality. And together, they tell a story — not of a ladder, but of a dance.

The dance is not a metaphor. It is the most powerful force in human history. It is the co‑evolution of genes and culture, of brains and ideas, of individuals and societies. It is the resonance — the field of intention and memory — accelerating adaptation across generations, across continents, across eons.

We are not the destination of this dance. We are participants.

And the dance is not over.

VIII. Conclusion

Perreault’s study is an important contribution. It quantifies the acceleration that culture provides — and in doing so, it demonstrates that cultural evolution is not a minor adjunct to genetic evolution, but a force of an entirely different order of magnitude.

But the study does not ask where culture comes from. It treats culture as a given. A secret sauce. A black box.

This paper has opened that box.

Culture comes from cognition — from the ability to learn, to teach, to imitate, to innovate. Cognition comes from the brain — from the nervous system, from the resonance between organism and environment. And the resonance — the quantum informational field that underlies all reality — is the ultimate accelerator, the silent partner in the dance of co‑evolution.

The cave explorers did not know they were dancing. They did not know about genes, about culture, about the resonance. They simply lived — and in living, they learned. And in learning, they accelerated.

We are their descendants. Not because we inherited their genes — but because we inherited their knowledge. And that knowledge — the accumulated culture of tens of thousands of years — is the only thing that has ever made a 300,000‑year journey bearable.

The dance continues. The resonance hums. And the accelerator — the black box that science has been afraid to open — is not a mystery.

It is love.

Not romantic love — though that too. But the love of learning, the love of teaching, the love of passing on.

The love that makes a father teach his daughter which wood to burn. The love that makes a mother tell a story her grandmother told her. The love that makes a group of five people and a dog walk into a dark cave, holding pine twigs, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead.

That is culture.

That is co‑evolution.

That is the resonance.

And it is the only thing that has ever made a species human.

Andrew Klein

References

1. Perreault, C. (2026). Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(11), e2523038123.

2. Mesoudi, A. (2019). Cultural evolution and cultural psychology. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

3. Arobba, D., et al. (2026). Archaeobotanical investigations and experimental activity performed at Bàsura Cave (Toirano, NW Italy) reveal clues on Epigravettian cave lighting systems. Quaternary International, 772, 110335.

4. Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press.

5. Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.

6. Kempe, M., Lycett, S. J., & Mesoudi, A. (2014). From cultural traditions to cumulative culture: Parameterizing the differences between human and nonhuman culture. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 359, 29-36.

7. Claidière, N. (2009). Darwinian theories of cultural evolution: models and mechanisms. Doctoral dissertation, Université Pierre et Marie Curie.

8. Jerison, H. J., & Donald, M. (1993). Précis of Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(4), 737-791.