The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over generations. Here we argue that there is insufficient credible evidence in favor of or against this technological complexity thesis. For one thing, the few datasets that are available hardly constitute a representative sample. For another, they substantiate very specific, and usually different versions of the complexity thesis or, even worse, do not point to complexity increases. We highlight the problems our findings raise for current work in cultural-evolutionary theory, and present various suggestions for future research.

中文翻译：

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复杂性和技术演变：每个人都知道什么？

文化进化论者的共识似乎是人类文化进化是累积性的，这通常是在特定意义上理解的，即文化特征，尤其是技术特征，会随着世代的复杂性而增加。在这里，我们认为支持或反对这一技术复杂性论点的可信证据不足。一方面，可用的少数数据集很难构成具有代表性的样本。另一方面，它们证实了非常具体的，通常是复杂性论文的不同版本，或者更糟糕的是，它们并不指向复杂性的增加。我们强调了我们的发现对当前文化进化理论工作提出的问题，并为未来的研究提出了各种建议。