Overview

Niche construction theory has had a particular impact in the human sciences, including biological anthropology (Anton et al. 2013; Zeder 2018), archaeology (Smith 2007; O'Brien & Laland 2012), and psychology (Flynn et al. 2013).

Niche construction is also widely recognized to have played important roles in human evolution (Fuentes 2009, 2017; Kendal et al. 2011; Anton et al. 2014), the evolution of human cognition and language (Bickerton 2009; Laland 2017), human impacts on biodiversity (Ellis 2015; Boivin et al. 2016), and the origins of domestication and agriculture (Smith 2007; Zeder 2015).

Why has niche construction theory been so influential in the human sciences? One reason is that it is self-apparent that humans possess an unusually potent capability to regulate, construct and destroy environments, and that this is generating some pressing current problems (e.g. climate change, …deforestation, urbanization). A second reason is niche construction theory’s recognition of human agency (and of human activities guiding selection rather than merely resulting from it), which is attractive to human scientists (Odling-Smee et al. 2003; Kendal et al. 2011; O’Brien & Laland 2012), with the important caveat that this emphasis on agency does not imply human niche construction is necessarily conscious or deliberate. A third reason is that niche construction theory emphasizes how acquired characters play an evolutionary role, and this is particularly relevant to human evolution, where our species appears to have engaged in extensive environmental modification through cultural practices (Laland et al. 2010). Niche construction theory provides an evolutionary framework capable of accommodating human cultural behavior in a way that doesn’t diminish its complexity and uniqueness, yet also shows how these behaviors are an extension of general evolutionary processes that pertain to non-human organisms.

Such cultural activities are typically not themselves biological adaptations (rather, they are the adaptive product of those much more general adaptations, such as the ability to learn, particularly from others, to teach, to use language, and so forth, that underlie human culture) and hence, cannot accurately be described as extended phenotypes.

Mathematical models reveal that niche construction due to human cultural processes can be as potent as gene-based niche construction, and establish that cultural niche construction can modify selection on human genes and drive evolutionary events (Laland et al. 2001; Creanza et al. 2012; Creanza & Feldman 2014, 2016). This interaction, known as ‘gene-culture co-evolution’, is also found in some animals, such as killer whales, orangutans and reed warblers (Whitehead et al. 2019). However, gene-culture coevolution reaches its zenith in humans. Cultural change will typically occur faster than genetic adaptation, and this has allowed cultural niche construction to play a prominent role in human evolution (Creanza et al. 2017).

There is now little doubt that human cultural niche construction has co-directed human evolution (Laland et al. 2010; Creanza et al. 2017). Humans have modified selection, for instance, by dispersing into new environments with different climatic regimes, devising agricultural practices or domesticating livestock.

The best-researched example of gene-culture co-evolution is the finding that dairy farming created the selection pressure that led to the spread of alleles for adult lactase persistence (Feldman & Cavalli-Sforza 1989; Gerbault et al. 2011). However, analyses of the human genome have identified many hundreds of genes subject to recent selection, many in response to human cultural activities (Laland et al. 2010). The evolution of lactose persistence may be representative of a very general pattern of gene-culture coevolution over the last 20,000 years.

One study reported 27 separate genes, known to have been subject to recent selection, for which the inferred cultural selection pressure is a change in diet associated with the advent of agriculture (Laland et al. 2010). In addition to the breakdown of dairy products, the list also includes genes expressed in the metabolism of carbohydrates, starch, proteins, lipids, phosphates, plant secondary compounds and alcohol, as well as jaw muscle fibres and tooth-enamel thickness.

In some West African populations, the cultural niche construction practice of cultivating yams has inadvertently generated selection for the haemoglobin S allele that underlies sickle cell anaemia. Slash and burn agriculture creates conditions that lead to increased standing water when it rains, and these puddles are perfect breeding grounds for malaria carrying mosquitos. The enhanced incidence of malaria, in turn, generates selection for gene variants that confer resistance to malaria, one of which is Hb S.

Cultural niche construction can also feed back to influence the cultural evolution of a second trait, for instance allowing for the coevolution of marriage customs and sex ratio biases (Creanza et al. 2012). Here, the spread of a cultural trait creates a cultural niche in which another cultural trait flourishes. A good example is provided by the demographic transition. The reduction in birth rate during the demographic transition is often viewed as a paradox because, from a traditional evolutionary perspective, it is difficult to envisage why individuals should prefer to have fewer children. However, cultural niche construction models show that if a cultural norm favoring greater education spreads, a preference for smaller family size follows, allowing the fertility rate to drop (Ihara & Feldman 2004).

The primary cause of cultural complexity is another conundrum that niche construction theory has helped to resolve. The issue had proven contentious, with some researchers suggesting that large populations support diverse cultural knowledge and others arguing that environmental factors are more important. The paradox is resolved when niche construction is taken into account (Collard et al. 2012; Fogarty & Creanza 2017). The effects of a changeable environment, to which food gatherers are subject, can be attenuated by the niche-constructing activities of food-producers, such as agriculturalists. As a result, the effect of the environment on cultural complexity is stronger in food-gathering populations and weaker in food-producing populations, whilst the effect of population size is stronger in producers compared to gatherers.

The niche-construction perspective has been productive in many other studies of human social behavior (Kendal et al. 2011; Creanza et al. 2017), including some that describe some dramatically large-scale consequences of culturally driven change. These include the extinction of megafauna after the arrival of humans and consequent shaping of global species distributions (Boivin et al. 2016), and the striking changes of landscapes in Bali (Lansing et al. 2009; Lansing & Fox 2011) and Polynesia (Quintus & Cochrane 2018) with complex cascades of ecological and social consequences following the cultivation of crops.

The human transition from hunting and gathering to food production economies provides another illustration of the explanatory power of niche construction theory (Smith 2007a, 2007b, 2012, 2016). Archaeological and paleo-environmental records from eastern North America, Amazonia, the Near East, and, increasingly, China,contradict the assumption of traditional explanatory frameworks that environments change and species adapt (Smith 2011; Zeder 2017; Ren et al. 2016; Lombardo et al. 2020). Conversely, explanations based on niche construction theory are well-supported in these regions. Archaeologists have concluded that extensive data concerning the domestication of plants and animals, and the development of agricultural societies, supports predictions derived from niche construction theory (Zeder & Smith 2009; Zeder 2017, 2018; Piperno 2017). Initial domestication of plants and animals, in turn, offer proponents of niche construction theory and the EES an opportunity to evaluate core assumptions about niche construction, ecological inheritance, plasticity first evolution, and reciprocal causality, in a major transition with profound impact on both human and non-human organisms (Zeder 2018).

Psychologists and linguists are also using niche construction theory. Researchers have stressed that the human mind is a symbol-generating and artefact-devising system, as a result of which children develop in a rich human-constructed world teeming with diverse symbols and artefacts. The constructed cognitive niche both shapes, and is shaped by, the child’s learning and development (Flynn et al. 2013). Peterson et al (2018) argue that physical signs and symbols left in the environment have played an important role in human evolution.

Niche construction is also now central to several accounts of how language evolved. For instance, Bickerton (2009) describes how our ancestors constructed scavenging niches that required them to communicate in order to recruit sufficient individuals to drive off predators away from megafauna corpses. He maintains that our use of language, in turn, created a new niche in which sophisticated cognition was beneficial. Tomlinson (2015, 2018) makes a related argument, and shows how it explains the origins of human music.