Semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution

Cultural evolution allows ideas and technology to build over generations, a process reaching its most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that generate innovations remain unclear. We propose that semantic knowledge-the associations linking concepts to their properties and functions-guides human innovation and drives cumulative culture. To test this, we combined an agent-based model, which examines how semantic knowledge shapes cultural evolutionary dynamics, with a large-scale behavioural experiment (N = 1,243) testing its role in human innovation. Semantic knowledge directed exploration toward meaningful solutions and interacted synergistically with social learning to amplify innovation and cultural evolution. Participants lacking access to semantic knowledge performed no better than chance, even when social information was available, and relied on shallow exploration strategies for innovation. Together, these findings indicate that semantic knowledge is a key cognitive process enabling human cumulative culture.