We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frieman (2024: 1421) notes, ideas and practices persist because they are “valued, recreated, manipulated, instrumentalised and enacted generation after generation”; and as Ingold (2024: 1417) puts it, traditional tasks “are not subject to the free will of the individual but fall upon practitioners as part of their responsibilities” to their communities. Drawing on the practice of Bronze Age metallurgy, Pollard (2024) asks the million-dollar questions: how does innovation occur, and what causes it? As both Prentiss (2024) and Pollard note, for example, the pace of technological change is often punctuated, an observation common across the natural and social sciences, but one that defies easy explanation (e.g. Duran-Nebreda et al. 2024; O'Brien et al. 2024).

我们感谢受访者对我们的辩论文章'文化进化作为继承，而不是意图（Bentley & O'Brien 2024）的评论。我们都同意，传统文化习俗——例如制造 Acheulean 手斧——通常需要花费大量时间来学习;正如 Gladwell （2008） 普遍提出的那样，成为专家需要 10 000 小时的实践。我们似乎也同意文化习俗是代际的。正如弗里曼 （2024： 1421） 所指出的，思想和实践之所以持续存在，是因为它们“一代又一代地被重视、再创造、操纵、工具化和颁布”;正如 Ingold （2024： 1417） 所说，传统任务“不受个人自由意志的约束，而是作为他们对社区的责任的一部分落在从业者身上”。借鉴青铜时代冶金学的实践，Pollard （2024） 提出了价值百万美元的问题：创新是如何发生的，是什么导致了创新？例如，正如 Prentiss （2024） 和 Pollard 所指出的那样，技术变革的步伐经常被打断，这是自然科学和社会科学中常见的观察结果，但无法简单解释（例如 Duran-Nebreda 等人，2024 年;O'Brien 等人。2024).