Modeling abrupt cultural regime shifts during the Palaeolithic and Stone Age

The coupled dynamics of the size and the mean cultural/technological level of a population, with positive feedback between these two variables, is modeled in the Malthusian–Boserupian framework. Bifurcation diagrams, with innovativeness or the cultureless carrying capacity as the parameter, show that abrupt transitions in the mean cultural level are possible. For example, a gradual evolutionary change toward greater innate innovativeness would produce an associated gradual increase in mean cultural level, until a threshold is crossed that triggers an abrupt cultural regime shift. Hence, the model may help explain the apparently sudden and dramatic efflorescences of Palaeolithic/Stone Age culture during the Late Pleistocene, without having to invoke major contemporaneous genetic changes in cognition. The results of statistical studies on the association between population size and toolkit diversity among ethnographic societies are also discussed.