Before social tinkering: Self‑organisation and collective social niches as foundations of cultural complexity.

Chater & Christiansen argue that cultural complexity emerges from incremental "social tinkering." We extend this by proposing that collective social niche construction - the self-organized modification of social environments - provides the necessary substrate for such tinkering. By examining adaptive social networks in animal societies, we show how structural complexity can accumulate through feedback loops before explicit rules or linguistic conventions emerge.