Nature Communications· 2015Q1
Experimental evidence for the co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language
- 578citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2015year
Short summary
Teaching and language significantly improve the transmission of Oldowan tool-making skills, with language being particularly effective, according to an experiment with 184 participants.
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Key points
- Teaching and language significantly improve Oldowan tool-making skill transmission compared to imitation or emulation.
- An experiment with 184 participants tested five different transmission mechanisms.
- Low-fidelity social transmission may explain the ~700,000-year stasis of the Oldowan technocomplex.
- Teaching or proto-language may have been prerequisites for Acheulean technology.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Hominin reliance on Oldowan stone tools-which appear from 2.5 mya and are believed to have been socially transmitted-has been hypothesized 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 five 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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Nature Communications, 2015 · DOI ↗
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Field: Cultural Studies
Cultural StudiesSocial Sciences