The origins of culture lie in the biological evolution of organisms with the capacity to receive the information on which culture is based. Our ancestors were biologically preadapted for the acquisition of natural language, which evolved culturally as a method of enhanced communication between members of a cooperating species. The acquisition of natural language turns each member of our species into a receiver for the cultural information that is represented in her native tongue. Information can be inherited only by receivers that can discretely represent its variations, and natural language delivers the ability to discretize information in the same way as the speakers from whom we have learned it. Although natural language has structural features which indicate that it evolved primarily as a method of communication, and its practice reveals a range of representational deficiencies, its representational capacity was sufficient to enable our ancestors to share an increasing amount of cultural information. Eventually, when this information exceeded their collective cognitive abilities, they found themselves prepared, by the same biological preadaptations that had made them ready for natural language, to acquire artefactual language. Members of this metarepresentational, cooperative species were able to learn ever-more-efficient methods of representation. The use of these novel representational systems was not restricted to kinship groups, but rather facilitated the formation of functional links between individuals who were socially unrelated to each other.