Abstract

Ever since the publication of On the Origin of Species, linguists, archaeologists, and anthropologists have explored the potential of the Darwinian framework (descent with modification) for explaining cultural diversity. Cultural phylogenetics, a rapidly developing field that applies methods from evolutionary biology to the study of culture, has made significant contributions to historical linguistics, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and behavioural ecology by providing insights into the processes that shape languages, material culture, traditions, and social norms. By reconstructing patterns of relatedness among cultural entities, phylogenetic methods enable researchers to infer underlying historical processes such as grammatical and lexical change, the evolution of artefact design, ancient human migrations, and the spread of cultural innovations. These methods also provide a means of accounting for common ancestry in cross-cultural comparisons. This chapter provides a historical and methodological review of cultural phylogenetics from the early comparative approaches to the emergence of computational phylogenetic methods, including tree-building techniques and comparative analyses. It highlights key studies in which these methods have been applied to diverse cultural domains and discusses their implications for understanding the dynamics of cultural change. In doing so, it underscores the broader significance of cultural phylogenetics as a bridge between the biological and social sciences, demonstrating how evolutionary principles can illuminate the mechanisms that drive cultural diversity and change.