While our findings support the idea that traditions should be widespread in foragers in cohesive groups living in patchy environments, for cumulative cultural change we expect a large context dependency. Previous theoretical work on diet learning showed that cumulative culture could arise as a side-effect of grouping and therefore might commonly occur in animal societies . Our results here suggest that in the context of skill learning, cumulative cultural increases in energy intake may only arise for OL and only in environments with high task difficulty. The latter supports the idea that cumulative cultural processes may occur predominantly in species with cognitively demanding forms of social learning . In particular, since SE and LE are inviable in environments with high task difficulty, our results suggest that OL would need to evolve before niches with high task difficulty could be invaded, and only thereafter would cumulative cultural increases in energy intake evolve. Previously we have argued that through this process, the evolution of cognitively demanding forms of social learning could open up novel niches . Further modelling work is needed to confirm these expectations.