Stone tool-making and the right cerebral hemisphere

Summary

Neuroscience research has linked both language and tool-use to neural circuits in the left hemisphere, leading to hypotheses of co-evolutionary interaction between these behaviors. However, it is known that the right hemisphere also contributes to language, particularly with respect to large scale (e.g. prosody, context) processing. Studies of actual tool-making, as opposed to simple use, are sparse, but similarly suggest right hemisphere involvement in the more complex and temporally extended processes involved in the goal-directed transformation of durable objects. In support of this, neuroimaging studies of experimental stone tool-making in our lab have consistently implicated right parietofrontal circuits. This includes evidence of brain activation observed using FDG-PET and fMRI, as well as experience-dependent white-matter structural changes observed using DTI. Comparative (chimpanzee, human, macaque) anatomical studies further indicate a derived rightward asymmetry of this parietofrontal tract in humans. We propose the hypothesis that human frontoparietal circuits in both hemispheres underwent adaptations for Paleolithic tool-making that were behaviorally co-opted (‘‘exapted") to support proto-linguistic communication and subsequently altered by secondary adaptations specific to language, especially in the left hemisphere.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Cognitive Archaeology

Keywords