whether animals solve their ecological problems on their own by individual trial-and-error learning (and social groups form only because animals converge on rich food patches) or do so socially and live in groups in order to make this possible.

Rather than opposing “cultural” with “evolutionary” or “biological” explanations, researchers have now developed a rich body of work showing how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptations. Culture, and cultural evolution

It is interesting to note that in the development of many languages the construction “it is to me” is followed later on by the construction “I have,” but as Emile Benveniste has pointed out, the evolution does not occur in the reverse direction.

Language is as much invented as learned. Babies don’t simply soak up associations between names and things or mimic adults’ use of words.