Early stone tools are claimed to be the earliest evidence for the cultural transmission of toolmaking techniques, and with it, cumulative culture. This claim has ostensibly been supported by experimental studies wherein modern humans learned stone tool production (knapping) in conditions that provided opportunities for cultural transmission. However, alternative hypotheses propose that individual learning was sufficient for the expression of early knapping techniques. In order to evaluate this possibility, the capacities of individuals to independently re-innovate early knapping techniques need to be determined. For this, individuals must be tested in cultural isolation, i.e., in a test condition in which knapping techniques cannot be culturally transmitted via demonstrations or reverse engineering. Here, we report on the results of this test condition with human participants (N = 28). Naïve individuals spontaneously re-innovated various early knapping techniques, resulting in products resembling the earliest core and flake technologies. These results contradict previous hypotheses and conclusions of earlier experiments that explicitly implicated cultural transmission in Oldowan stone tool production. They suggest instead that knapping techniques among pre-modern hominins could have been individually derived rather than necessitating cultural transmission.
Early stone tool production, or knapping, techniques are claimed to be the earliest evidence for cultural transmission in the human lineage. Previous experimental studies have trained human participants to knap in conditions involving opportunities for cultural transmission. Subsequent knapping was then interpreted as evidence for a necessity of the provided cultural transmission opportunities for these techniques. However, a valid necessity claim requires showing that individual learning alone cannot lead to early knapping techniques. Here, we tested human participants ( N = 28) in cultural isolation for the individual learning of early knapping techniques by providing them with relevant raw materials and a puzzle task as motivation. Twenty-five participants were technique naïve according to posttest questionnaires, yet they individually learned early knapping techniques, therewith producing and using core and flake tools. Early knapping techniques thus do not necessitate cultural transmission of know-how and could likewise have been individually derived among premodern hominins.
OverviewVideo games are unparalleled as an interactive medium and can serve as potential educational tools through intelligent game design and the players’ immersion in the game world (e.g., Mayo 2009; Rassalle 2021; Rubio-Campillo 2020; Winter 2021). At the same time, video games, like any media, might also misinform (e.g., Aron 2020; Dennis 2019; Emery and Reinhard 2016). In this review, I present my impressions of the game Ancestors: A Humankind Odyssey (Panache Digital Games 2019), specifically regarding its portrayal of paleoanthropological themes. In preparing this review, I played the game in its entirety and subsequently interviewed the developers in order to clarify their intentions when designing the game (Patrice Désilets and Marc-André De Blois, personal communication 2021). Using the medium of video games, is it possible to make a “perfectly” accurate simulation of human evolution? Perhaps, but that may not matter anyway. In my view, video games, as exemplified by Ancestors, have great potential for exploring the basic components of human evolution and to reach and inspire a wider public that might otherwise learn very little about the subject matter.
While culture is widespread in the animal kingdom, human culture has been claimed to be special due to being cumulative. It is currently debated which cognitive abilities support cumulative culture, but behavior copying is one of the main abilities proposed. One important source of contention is the presence or absence of behavior copying in our closest living relatives, non-human great apes (apes) -especially given that their behavior does not show clear signs of cumulation. Those who claim that apes copy behavior often base this claim on the existence of stable ape cultures in the wild van Schaik et al. 2003). We developed an individual-based model to test whether ape cultural patterns can both emerge and stabilize in the entire absence of any behavior copying, but only allowing for a well-supported alternative social learning mechanism, namely socially-mediated reinnovation, where only the frequency of reinnovation is under social influence, but the form of the behavior is not. Our model reflects wild ape life conditions, including physiological and behavioral individual needs, demographic and spatial features, and the possible range of genetic and ecological variations between populations. Our results show that, under a wide range of realistic values of all model parameters, we fully reproduce the most defining features of wild ape cultural patterns van Schaik et al. 2003). Overall, our results show that ape cultures can both emerge and stabilize without behavior copying. Ape cultures are therefore unable to pinpoint behavior copying abilities, lending support to the notion that behavior copying is, among apes, unique in the human lineage. HighlightsHuman culture is cumulative: it grows in complexity and efficiency, drawing on innovations of previous generations. In contrast, ape cultures are not clearly cumulative. It has been proposed that cumulative culture depends on our ability to accurately transmit and preserve information, with behavior copying as a crucial mechanism. At the same time, researchers have claimed that non-human apes can also copy others' behavior. We show, through computer simulations, that patterns used to infer the existence of behavior copying in wild apes -ape cultures -can be reproduced in full, under realistic conditions, without any behavior copying skills necessary. This shows that the assumption that ape cultures are underlain by behavior copying cannot be proven by the mere existence of ape cultures.
The method of exclusion identifies patterns of distributions of behaviours and/or artefact forms among different groups, where these patterns are deemed unlikely to arise from purely genetic and/or ecological factors. The presence of such patterns is often used to establish whether a species is cultural or not—i.e. whether a species uses social learning or not. Researchers using or describing this method have often pointed out that the method cannot pinpoint which specific type(s) of social learning resulted in the observed patterns. However, the literature continues to contain such inferences. In a new attempt to warn against these logically unwarranted conclusions, we illustrate this error using a novel approach. We use an individual-based model, focused on wild ape cultural patterns—as these patterns are the best-known cases of animal culture and as they also contain the most frequent usage of the unwarranted inference for specific social learning mechanisms. We built a model that contained agents unable to copy specifics of behavioural or artefact forms beyond their individual reach (which we define as “copying”). We did so, as some of the previous inference claims related to social learning mechanisms revolve around copying defined in this way. The results of our model however show that non-copying social learning can already reproduce the defining—even iconic—features of observed ape cultural patterns detected by the method of exclusion. This shows, using a novel model approach, that copying processes are not necessary to produce the cultural patterns that are sometimes still used in an attempt to identify copying processes. Additionally, our model could fully control for both environmental and genetic factors (impossible in real life) and thus offers a new validity check for the method of exclusion as related to general cultural claims—a check that the method passed. Our model also led to new and additional findings, which we likewise discuss.
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