3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Paige, Jonathan; Perreault, Charles
• 署名单位: University of Missouri System; University of Missouri Columbia; Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-13040
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2319175121
• 发表日期: 2024-06-25
• 关键词: lithic technology; EVOLUTION; gona; accumulation; reduction; hominin; turkana; niche; bones; afar

摘要

Cumulative culture, the accumulation of modifications, innovations, and improvements over generations through social learning, is a key determinant of the behavioral diversity across Homo sapiens populations and their ability to adapt to varied ecological habitats. Generations of improvements, modifications, and lucky errors allow humans to use technologies and know-how well beyond what a single naive individual could invent independently within their lifetime. The human dependence on cumulative culture may have shaped the evolution of biological and behavioral traits in the hominin lineage, including brain size, body size, life history, sociality, subsistence, and ecological niche expansion. Yet, we do not know when, in the human career, our ancestors began to depend on cumulative culture. Here, we show that hominins likely relied on a derived form of cumulative culture by at least similar to 600 kya, a result in line with a growing body of existing evidence. We analyzed the complexity of stone tool manufacturing sequences over the last 3.3 My of the archaeological record. We then compare these to the achievable complexity without cumulative culture, which we estimate using nonhuman primate technologies and stone tool manufacturing experiments. We find that archaeological technologies become significantly more complex than expected in the absence of cumulative culture only after similar to 600 kya.