The Role of Verbal Interaction During Experimental Bifacial Stone Tool Manufacture

The Archaeology of Teaching and the Evolution ofHomo docens

“…To demonstrate the importance of understanding the concept of a platform, we here expand on results presented by Putt, Woods, and Franciscus (2014). In an experimental study, they show that the overall shape of a bifacial stone tool and the concept of symmetry during stone tool reduction can be learned by both verbal and nonverbal teaching.…”

“…The important question, however, is how the technology can be maintained in a culture over several generations without substantial drift. In our paper, we report on the experiment by Putt, Woods, and Franciscus (2014), where two groups of novice knappers were instructed to produce a tool resembling an Acheulean hand-axe, one group by demonstration, the other by demonstration and verbal instruction. The result was that those instructed by demonstration alone tried to make hand-axes that were as similar as possible to the models, but they never understood the concept of a platform nor its importance in the process as a high-level subgoal.…”

Evolutionary neuroscience of cumulative culture

“…Nevertheless intentional demonstration and linguistic instruction are clearly helpful (27), and such teaching did eventually become a vital part of human technological reproduction (53). Archaeological evidence cannot demonstrate that a particular form of teaching was essential at a given point in prehistory but does document transmission of quite complex and demanding techniques by Late Acheulean times (41), some of which modern humans find difficult to convey without explicit verbal instruction (40,97).…”

“…This requires mastery of relationships, for example between the force and location of the strike and the morphology, positioning, and support of the core (29,38,39), that are not perceptually available to naïve observers and cannot be directly communicated as semantic knowledge. Attempts to implement semantic knowledge of knapping strategies before perceptualmotor skill development are ineffective at best (40,41), and such knowledge decays rapidly along knapping transmission chains when practice time is limited, even if explicit verbal teaching is allowed (27). For observational learning, the challenge is to translate visual and auditory information of another's actions to appropriate motor commands for one's own body.…”

Test, Model, and Method Validation: The Role of Experimental Stone Artifact Replication in Hypothesis-driven Archaeology

“…Results of such tests are not necessarily meant to be directly compared to archaeological data but instead to serve as a means of formally assessing and understanding the bounds of what is practically achievable when making or using stone tools in order to support or falsify potential motivating factors underlying patterns of tool production, use, morphology, and variability (Diez-Martin and Eren 2012; Lycett and Eren 2013b). There are several broad avenues of inquiry that have been investigated by means of experimental tests, including comparative morphology (Driscoll 2011;Eren and Lycett 2012;Gurtov, Buchanan, and Eren 2015;Presnyakova et al 2015;Williams and Andrefsky 2011); process controls (Patten 2002(Patten , 2005(Patten , 2009); tool use-life (Shott 2002); cognition and language (Geribas, Mosquera, and Vergès 2010;Mahaney 2014;Morgan et al 2015b;Putt, Woods, and Franciscus 2014;Stout et al 2000;Uomini and Meyer 2013); biomechanics (Faisal et al 2010;Key and Lycett 2011;Key and Dunmore 2015;Nonaka, Bril, and Rein 2010;Rolian, Lieberman, and Zermeno 2011;Richmond 2012, 2014); and the influence of stone raw material differences on lithic form (Archer and Braun 2010;Eren et al 2014b), production technology (Bar-Yosef et al 2012), tool function Galán and Domínguez-Rodrigo 2014;Rodríguez-Rellán, Valcarce, and Esnaola 2013;Waguespack et al 2009;Wilkins, Schoville, and Brown 2014), knapper skill (Duke and Pargeter 2015;Sampson 2011b, Eren et al 2011c;Stout and Semaw 2006;Winton 2005), use-wear accru...…”