Spontaneous Ability to Impose Form by Knapping-Naïve Humans

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human culture’s unique complexity depends upon the ability to faithfully transmit know-how over generations. Given other primates do not exhibit a similar capacity, when hominins began to transmit know-how between one another is a key question for human evolution. In the archaeological record, the reoccurrence of stone artifact forms is often taken as evidence that these forms and/or their underlying production techniques were culturally transmitted—in both cases, know-how copying is assumed. However, the key premise that learning to impose these forms requires cultural transmission of know-how remains an untested assumption. We tested whether the generalized ability to impose form requires cultural transmission using a novel puppet knapper experiment. Individuals naive to stone knapping (the “puppeteers”) attempted to impose 12 target forms onto glass blanks by directing an expert knapper (the “puppet”) what to do. The results of two independent sorting tasks and geometric morphometric analyses demonstrate the puppeteers successfully imposed various target forms via the puppet. These findings suggest that the ability to impose form by knapping may not be dependent on knapping experience per se, nor require cultural transmission. If true, imposed artifact forms would not necessarily constitute “smoking gun” evidence for the beginnings of cumulative culture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35676.0