Crema, Bortolini and Lake identify a crucial asymmetry between ideas and the public objects through which ideas travel. Their simulations show that cultural transmission mediated by artefacts can generate patterns different from direct person-to-person transmission, while archaeological inference becomes distorted when object frequencies are treated as simple proxies for underlying mental representations. The iconic operation is the separation of transmission into two vulnerable moments: embedding ideational information in an object and retrieving information from that object. Error can occur at either stage, meaning that copying is never a frictionless duplication of an internal state. Methodologically, the paper turns object-mediated cultural evolution into a formal problem that can be experimentally varied rather than assumed. Its theoretical contribution is to give material carriers causal importance in cultural reproduction. The work bridges archaeology, cultural evolution and information theory by showing that the form and frequency of external manifestations alter the dynamics through which cultural variants persist, mutate and become statistically visible.
