Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is traditionally argued that cumulative culture relies on high-fidelity social transmission and advanced cognitive skills, here I show that a much simpler system suffices. Cumulative culture spontaneously emerged in artificial agents who navigate with a minimal cognitive architecture of goal-direction, social proximity, and route memory. Within each generation, naive individuals benefitted from being paired with experienced navigators because they could follow previously established routes. Crucially, experienced navigators also benefitted from the presence of naive individuals through regression to the goal. As experienced agents followed their memorised path, their naive counterparts (unhindered by route memory) were more likely to err towards than away from the goal, and thus biased the pair in that direction. This improved route efficiency within each generation. In control experiments, cumulative culture was attenuated when agents' social proximity or route memory were lesioned, whereas eliminating goal-direction only reduced efficiency. These results demonstrate that cumulative cultural evolution occurs even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought. One interpretation of this finding is that current definitions are too loose, and should be narrowed. An alternative conclusion is that rudimentary cumulative culture is an emergent property of systems that seek social proximity and have an imprecise memory capacity, providing a flexible complement to traditional evolutionary mechanisms.

翻译：累积文化演化（cumulative cultural evolution）指适应性创新通过社会学习代代相传的过程。该过程塑造了人类的技术创新，也在非人类物种中发生。传统观点认为，累积文化依赖于高保真度的社会传递和高级认知技能，但本文表明一个更为简单的系统便足以实现。在具有目标导向、社交亲近和路径记忆等最小认知架构的人工智能体（artificial agent）中，累积文化自发涌现。每一代中，无经验个体通过与有经验导航者配对而获益，因为它们能跟随早已建立的路径。关键在于，有经验导航者同样可从无经验个体的存在中获益——通过向目标回归（regression to the goal）。当有经验智能体沿其记忆路径移动时，其无经验同伴（不受路径记忆束缚）更可能朝目标而非远离目标的方向偏离，从而引导这对组合偏向该方向。这提升了每一代内的路径效率。在对照实验中，当智能体的社交亲近或路径记忆功能受损时，累积文化效应减弱；而消除目标导向功能仅降低效率。这些结果表明，即便缺乏复杂的交流或思维，累积文化演化仍会发生。对该发现的一种解读是，当前定义过于宽泛，应加以限定；另一种结论是，基础性累积文化是追求社交亲近且具有不完全记忆能力的系统涌现的属性，为传统演化机制提供了灵活的补充。