Reply to Henrich et al.: The Tasmanian effect and other red herrings

Abstract

Henrich and his large group of cosigners (1) miss the point of our paper (2). They believe we were rejecting the relevance of population size in cultural evolution outright, whereas we were critiquing the recent trend in archaeology to use population size to explain patterns in the archaeological record; hence, our title “Population size does not explain past changes in cultural complexity” (2). Perhaps not surprisingly given their misreading of our paper, none of Henrich et al.’s points (1) contradicts our argument. We argued that the recent wave of studies in which population size is claimed to explain past changes in cultural complexity is problematic. One cause for concern, we averred, is that the models that … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: k.vaesen{at}tue.nl. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

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