The Social Transmission of Oldowan Lithic Technology

Summary

Flint flakes appear in the archaeological record from 2.5mya and the skill to produce them is believed to have been socially transmitted. However, how this occurred remains a mystery. In an experiment involving 184 participants, we investigated how effectively five different forms of transmission facilitate the acquisition of the ability to produce Oldowan flakes. We compared i) reverse engineering of discarded flakes, ii) observational learning, iii) basic "ape-like" teaching, iv) gestural teaching and v) verbal teaching. We found that teaching, particularly verbal teaching, allowed participants to produce a greater number of flakes from a single piece of flint, to do so more rapidly and with more efficient use of raw materials and energy, than did reverse engineering. There was no evidence that observational learning improved performance relative to reverse engineering. We conclude that reliance on stone tools during the Oldowan would have generated selection for enhanced means of communication and it is likely that forms of teaching were present during the Oldowan. We also suggest that the appearance of Acheulean technology 1.7mya relied, in part, on the prior evolution of novel forms of communication, which, given the complexity of Acheulean tool-making, plausibly involved a simple form of symbolic communication.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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