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      Experimental Evidence for the Co-Evolution of Hominin Tool-Making Teaching and Language

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          Abstract

          Hominin reliance on Oldowan stone tools – which appear from 2.5mya and are believed to have been socially transmitted – has been hypothesised to have led to the evolution of teaching and language. Here we present an experiment investigating the efficacy of transmission of Oldowan tool-making skills along chains of adult human participants (N=184) using 5 different transmission mechanisms. Across six measures, transmission improves with teaching, and particularly with language, but not with imitation or emulation. Our results support the hypothesis that hominin reliance on stone tool-making generated selection for teaching and language and imply that ( i) low-fidelity social transmission, such as imitation/emulation, may have contributed to the ~700,000 year stasis of the Oldowan technocomplex, and ( ii) teaching or proto-language may have been pre-requisites for the appearance of Acheulean technology. This work supports a gradual evolution of language, with simple symbolic communication preceding behavioural modernity by hundreds of thousands of years.

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          The cultural niche: why social learning is essential for human adaptation.

          Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, Joseph Henrich (2011)
          In the last 60,000 y humans have expanded across the globe and now occupy a wider range than any other terrestrial species. Our ability to successfully adapt to such a diverse range of habitats is often explained in terms of our cognitive ability. Humans have relatively bigger brains and more computing power than other animals, and this allows us to figure out how to live in a wide range of environments. Here we argue that humans may be smarter than other creatures, but none of us is nearly smart enough to acquire all of the information necessary to survive in any single habitat. In even the simplest foraging societies, people depend on a vast array of tools, detailed bodies of local knowledge, and complex social arrangements and often do not understand why these tools, beliefs, and behaviors are adaptive. We owe our success to our uniquely developed ability to learn from others. This capacity enables humans to gradually accumulate information across generations and develop well-adapted tools, beliefs, and practices that are too complex for any single individual to invent during their lifetime.
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            Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behavior.

            Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, Mark G. Thomas (2009)
            The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.
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              Paleolithic technology and human evolution.

              S. H. Ambrose (2001)
              Article 0 comments Cited 177 times – based on 0 reviews     Review now
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Journal ID (nlm-journal-id): 101528555
                Journal ID (pubmed-jr-id): 37539
                Journal ID (nlm-ta): Nat Commun
                Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Nat Commun
                Title: Nature communications
                ISSN (Electronic): 2041-1723
                Publication date Nihms-submitted: 4 December 2014
                Publication date (Electronic): 13 January 2015
                Publication date Collection: 2015
                Publication date PMC-release: 13 July 2015
                Volume: 6
                Page: 6029
                Affiliations
                [a ]Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AJ, U.K.
                [b ]Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 94720, United States
                [c ]Department of Archaeology, Classics & Egyptology, University of Liverpool, L69 3BX, U.K.; Department of Linguistics and Department of Primatology, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
                [d ]Department of Biology, McGill University, H3A 1B1, Canada
                [e ]Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, Fife, KY16, 9JP, U.K.
                [f ]Department of Anthropology, University College London, WC1E 6BT, U.K.
                [g ]Institute of Archaeology, University College London, WC1H 0PY, U.K.
                Author notes
                [* ]Correspondence: K. N. Laland: knl1@ 123456st-andrews.ac.uk , 01334 463568; N. T. Uomini: N.Uomini@ 123456liverpool.ac.uk , 01517 945787

                Authors’ contributions

                TM, NU, LR and KL designed the experiment; TM, NU, LR, LT, SS, HL, CC and CE executed the experiment; TM, NU, IdlT and RK coded the data; TM carried out the analyses; all authors contributed to the preparation of the manuscript.

                Article
                Manuscript ID: EMS61376
                DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7029
                PMC ID: 4338549
                PubMed ID: 25585382
                SO-VID: 9af1c6ad-642f-4082-9da1-f05ad8547667
                History
                Categories
                Subject: Article

                ScienceOpen disciplines: Uncategorized
                Keywords: tool-use,human evolution,social transmission,language evolution
                Data availability:
                ScienceOpen disciplines: Uncategorized
                Keywords: tool-use, human evolution, social transmission, language evolution

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