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KatjaGrace comments on Superintelligence 5: Forms of Superintelligence - Less Wrong Discussion
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Bostrom offers the skills of isolated hunter-gatherer bands as support for the claim that the achievements of humans are substantially due to our improved cognitive architecture over that of other sophisticated animals, rather than due to our participation in a giant collective intelligence (p57). However as he notes in footnote 13, this is fairly hard to interpret because isolated hunter-gatherer tribes are still part of substantially larger groups - at a minimum, including many earlier generations, who passed down information to them via language. If humans merely had unusually good abilities to accumulate knowledge from one another, it seems then unclear that isolated hunter gatherer bands should have fewer capabilities than they do. Do I infer too little from this evidence? Is there not better evidence for this thesis e.g. based on chimpanzee performance on intellectual tasks?
There's interesting work on how culture accumulates in function of distinct kinds of imitation. Richerson and Boyd have done much of the theorizing. Tim Tyler who frequently publishes on Lesswrong wrote a book on Memetics which might give some hints. Finally Alex Mesoudi has specifically studies levels of optimality in different copying strategies.