Was Acheulean Technology Genetically Transmitted? Comparing Variation in Acheulean Tools to Variation in North American Bird Nests

Summary

Acheulean large cutting tools were made across Africa and Eurasia for ~1.5 million years, and show surprisingly little variation for a technology so spatiotemporally vast. One explanation for this puzzling degree of conservatism is that Acheulean tools were not culturally transmitted but rather genetically determined. If this hypothesis is true, then Acheulean tools are more akin to animal technologies such as bird nests than to modern human tools. Here we examine the extent to which the variation in Acheulean tools compares to the variation among bird nests of North American passerines. We compare measurements of Acheulean tools (N = 3,526) to measurements among simulated, time-averaged nest assemblages derived from observations across North America (N = 2,544). We discuss the results, as well as the potential of natural experiments, such as the evolution of bird nests, in exploring difficult problems in lithic analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21017