Early humans appear to have experienced a sudden and rapid advance in technology around 600,000 years ago, according to new findings by a team of anthropologists studying the use of ancient stone tools.
The researchers behind the findings say this likely represents a key inflection point in ancient human development, where the transmission of ancient knowledge from generation to generation, known as cumulative culture, led to incremental advances in society that drove humanity’s biological, cultural and technological development .
“Our species, Homo sapiens, has been able to adapt to environmental conditions — from tropical forests to arctic tundra — that require different kinds of problems to solve,” said Associate Professor Charles Perrault, an anthropologist at Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution. and social change. and Research Scientist at the Institute of Human Origins. “Cumulative culture is key because it allows human populations to build on and recombine the solutions of previous generations and develop new complex solutions to problems very quickly.”
Tool making suddenly experienced rapid advances in technology
In their study, “3.3 million years of stone tool sophistication suggests that cumulative culture began in the Middle Pleistocene,” which appears in the journal PNAS, Perreault and co-author Jonathan Page, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, explain how their analysis of stone tools dating back 3.3 million years revealed this sudden and unexpected technological leap.
The researchers analyzed tools collected from 57 separate ancient hominin sites. The oldest tool, dating back over 3 million years, comes from an African site. However, the researchers also examined ancient stone tools found at ancient hominin sites in Eurasia, Greenland, Sahul, Oceania and the Americas.
The team then ranked the complexity of the tools. This meant analyzing how many steps had to be taken to create the tool in question. The researchers characterized and ranked 62 different toolmaking sequences.
After charting the complexity of the instruments, the team saw some unexpected patterns. Tools made 3.3 million years ago and 1.8 million years ago required somewhere between two and four procedural units to produce. The complexity of stone tools increased steadily over the next 1.2 million years, with the best examples requiring an impressive seven steps. Although significantly more complex than tools made more than a million years earlier, the researchers say this is still within the range of complexity for a craftsman. This means that the knowledge of previous generations of tool makers was most likely not passed down during this period.
However, the researchers found that when they looked at tools made about 600,000 years ago, in the Middle Pleistocene, they began to see a sudden and unexpected increase in complexity. The tools of this period were not only more complex, but more complex manufacturing processes were required to make these tools.
“We analyzed stone tools made in the last 3.3 million years,” the researchers explain. “We found that these stone tools remained simple until around 600,000 BC. After that point, stone tools rapidly became more complex.’
While earlier instruments required only a few procedural steps to manufacture, instruments of this time often required as many as 18 steps. According to Page and Perot, these are too many steps for one generation of artisans to achieve without the knowledge passed down from previous generations.
This evidence, the researchers wrote, is consistent with the findings of other research teams, suggesting that such a rapid transition “signals the development of cumulative culture in the human lineage.”
“About 600,000 years ago, hominin populations began to rely on unusually complex technologies, and we see a rapid increase in complexity after that time as well,” Page said. “Both of these findings are consistent with what we expect to see among hominins that rely on cumulative culture.”
The Dawn of Cumulative Culture and the Evolution of Modern Humans
Although the evolution of stone tool production provides evidence for the dawn of a cumulative culture, the researchers behind the findings say such a jump likely affected all aspects of early humans. This likely includes changes in human culture, biology, and even the ability to adapt to a range of environments and habitats found around the world.
“Human reliance on cumulative culture may have shaped the evolution of biological and behavioral traits in the hominin lineage,” Page and Perrault explain, “including brain size, body size, life history, sociality, subsistence, and ecological niche expansion.”
Such changes can become more complex as genetic and cultural evolution occur simultaneously. According to the researchers, this “coevolutionary process of gene culture” may explain increases in relative brain size, extended life histories “and other key traits underlying human uniqueness.”
In particular, the researchers point out that the Middle Pleistocene shows many other examples of evolving technology. For example, studies from this era reveal consistent evidence for the controlled use of fire, hearths, and other domestic spaces. This era also included the evolution of wooden structures built from logs cut using tools that, the researchers explain, “were stone blades attached to wooden or bone handles.”
In their conclusion, Page and Perrault note that tool production is only one measure of cumulative culture, and further study may detect other increases in this behavior that may have occurred in the past but are not immediately apparent in the archaeological record. . “Early hominins may have relied on cumulative culture to develop complex social, foraging, and technological behaviors that are archaeologically invisible,” they write.
Ultimately, the research team believes their findings show how knowledge can be passed down through generations without each succeeding generation having to rediscover the knowledge of the past. When enough knowledge is passed down, as it appears to have been 600,000 years ago, this process can lead to an ever-increasing and adaptive pool of knowledge that allows for successive upward development in cultural and technological evolution.
“Generations of improvements, modifications, and lucky mistakes can generate technologies and know-how far beyond what a naive individual could independently invent in a lifetime,” the researchers conclude. “When a child inherits the culture of his parents’ generation, he inherits the result of thousands of years of happy mistakes and experiments.”
“The result is that our cultures—from technological problems and solutions to the way we organize our institutions—are too complex for people to figure out on their own,” Perrault adds.
Christopher Plein is a science fiction and fantasy writer and the chief science writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him h, learn more about his books at plainfiction.com or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
