Natural languages vary widely in the degree to which they make use of nested compositional structure in their grammars. It has long been noted by linguists that the languages historically spoken in small communities develop much deeper levels of compositional embedding than those spoken by larger groups. Recently, this observation has been confirmed by a robust statistical analysis of the World Atlas of Language Structures. In order to examine this connection mechanistically, we propose an agent‐based model that accounts for key (...) cultural evolutionary features of language transfer and language change. We identify transitivity as a physical parameter of social networks critical for the evolution of compositional structure and the hierarchical patterning of scale‐free distributions as inhibitory. (shrink)

The cognitive, psychological and sociological mechanisms underpinning complex social relationships among small groups are a part of our primate heritage. However, among human groups, relationships persist over much greater temporal and spatial scales, often in the physical absence of one or other of the individuals themselves. This chapter examines how such individual face-to-face social interactions were ‘scaled up’ during human evolution to the regional and global networks characteristic of modern societies. One recent suggestion has been that a radical change in (...) human sociality occurred with the shift to sedentary and agricultural societies in the early Neolithic. The discussion presents the results of a focused study of the long-term development of regional social networks in the Near East, using the distribution of different forms of material culture as a proxy for the social relationships that underpinned processes of trade, exchange and the dissemination of material culture practices. (shrink)