Beyond social tinkering: Toward a mechanistic and multilevel theory of cultural complexity.

Chater and Christiansen argue that cultural complexity arises through social "tinkering." While compelling, this framework remains mechanistically underspecified. Integrating recent empirical and theoretical advances, this commentary proposes that cultural complexity emerges from interactions among transmission dynamics, cognitive constraints, social network structure, and environmental pressures and calls for a formalized, testable multilevel theory.