For most of human history cultural change was extremely slow, so slow as to be imperceptible. I'm not sure the neanderthals experienced any less dynamic a culture than the modern humans living at the same time.
Perhaps expecting change makes change more likely. Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off.
I'm pretty skeptical that cultural change was meaningfully slower (except as limited by effective population sizes). Cultural change for early humans is nearly invisible in the material record. Imagine that all archaeologists of the far future find nothing from the current era except iphones without working storage. Do they indicate a unified global culture without cultural change outside WWDC?
Obviously not, even though there are aspects of a shared global culture indicated by their global distribution. Material culture is related to culture, but it's an imperfect and imprecise record. The same issue occurs with correlating culture with genetics or language.
Sure, but this is true of neanderthals as well. So we can't say we are especially creative or dynamic in our culture. We can say that our material culture, that small fragment of it that was preserved, was static.
That was the point: I also wouldn't say that about neanderthals.
The evidence on the ground is of course, limited. But it's a fairly common view among anthropologists/archaeologists that our perspective on ancient societies is immensely limited by the material record, hence the generally positive reception to Dawn of Everything despite its sketchy details and interpretations.
"Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off."
True, but not the entire picture either. From what we know, even hunters and gatherers living in inhospitable regions have a rich oral culture and extensive pantheons of gods, demigods and legendary heroes. There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.
> There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.
And we have no evidence that we are different in this from Neanderthals (arguably also humans). There is evidence of cultural variation among chimps, so there must also be cultural change. Do they yearn for things more than calories? Well, they play. They are curious.
I am extremely skeptical of claims that humans are special. We are strongly motivated to find this to be true. On the one hand, it flatters us. On the other hand, it justifies believing we are ethically distinct. This same way of thinking has been applied to other humans with results we now deplore.
Are we special, the chosen creatures? Maybe. We sure want to believe we are. It's fun and useful to be special! But maybe we should be cautious leaping to that conclusion. I think Jane Goodall was of this mind as well.
"Special" means different things for different people.
For me, humans are special in their capability to create extensive culture. That does not mean that $deity has created us in its image, it may well be a random fluke of evolution.
But we haven't seen a cave painting done by non-humans yet, nor heard a story narrated by them.