The stage was set for a Darwinian approach to material culture, not from within archaeology, but from disciplines as diverse as evolutionary biology, paleontology, and evolutionary cultural anthropology.
Research and discussion among evolutionary material culture scholars has already created a rich body of literature and has stimulated a range of insights.
Laland, Kendal, and Kendal review the evolutionary effects of culture by describing that not only does culture, like other forms of niche construction, offer opportunities for adaptive behavior, but it can also become an independent pathway for evolution that limits the interconnection of individual organisms with the external environment.
Prisoners write letters asking for books on evolutionary theory, Aztec culture, and poetry anthologies; others want Chomsky, Tolstoy, or Malcolm X. "Wodehouse is the man," one inmate wrote.
These worries are sometimes raised by theorists from the social sciences who are hostile to evolutionary theories of culture.
It is striking that even skaters, with their active counter-culture identities and perhaps anti-school mentalities, may find themselves at the center of a scientific case study as real world participants in material culture evolutionary processes.
Although Spencer is sometimes credited with initiating the application of evolutionary thinking to culture, Spencer's contributions in this domain and others are often regarded as scientifically worthless (although see Jablonka and Lamb 2005, 372-3 for an exception).
This theory, originally put forward by Richard Dawkins (1976), is perhaps the best known attempts to apply evolutionary thinking to culture; that said, while it has enjoyed considerable popular attention, it has not become well established in scientific circles.
The most serious and most respected efforts to apply evolutionary thinking to culture begin from a different starting point to memetics (although see Shennan 2008, 2011 for significant work that takes the meme's-eye view).
According to Prof Luncz, the findings also provide insight into how human social behaviour has evolved: "In many ways, chimpanzees are very similar to us humans and by studying the similarities to our closest living relatives, we have the unique opportunity to learn more about the evolutionary roots of culture, which is one of the key elements of our identity".
