Humans began passing on knowledge to future generations 600,000 years ago
The emergence of a “accumulation culture” — a culture of teaching others and passing on knowledge — may have reached a turning point around the time that Neanderthals and modern humans diverged from their common ancestor.
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Researchers have long thought that our ability to use tools and share cultural practices is what sets humans apart, but the animal kingdom is full of examples of the opposite, including stick-wielding pigs, puzzle-solving bumblebees and pods of sperm whales that “chatter” in different dialects.
Humans remain unique when it comes to preserving know-how. Through generations of trial and error, humans fine-tuned their knowledge and innovations, learning how to make spear tips, how to build wheels, and everything that followed the wheel, from the ox cart to Tesla. Learning from past breakthroughs allowed humans to share knowledge and pass it on to future generations, resulting in an accumulated culture that became a key asset in human evolution. “Complex and diverse cultural traditions are likely a major reason why humans were successful in expanding into areas like the Arctic tundra. [or] “They destroyed the rainforest and developed cultural adaptations to thrive in it,” says Jonathan Page, an archaeologist who studies cultural evolution at the University of Missouri.
Pinpointing exactly when humans began to accumulate cultural insights has proven difficult because anthropologists can’t directly observe ancient people’s social interactions or cultural practices. So Page recently turned to stone tools as a proxy for understanding when humans began to build on what they learned. In a paper published today in the journal Nature, he writes: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Page and his team conclude: Humans were making use of the culture that had accumulated by the Middle Pleistocene, about 600,000 years ago..
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Humans and our close hominin relatives have been making stone tools for millions of years. But not all ancient tools are created equal. Some, like the 2-million-year-old Oldowan tools, are simple tools that cut stone in only two directions. Others are much more complex and specialized, like the Polynesian square axe, a multi-faceted stone blade used by ancient Hawaiians to cut wood.
Page and his team scoured the scientific literature to find dozens of examples of stone tools made by humans over the past 3.3 million years. To compare the complexity of different tools, the team counted the number of steps it took to make each tool. Page likens these steps to the steps in a recipe: “A recipe with more steps is more complicated than one with fewer steps,” he says. Some tools, such as a 2.6-million-year-old sharpened rock piece found in Ethiopia, required just three steps to make, while others, such as a finely tuned blade made in Finland about 10,000 years ago, required 19 steps to make. The team compared the complexity of the ancient tools to a benchmark of stone tools made without cumulative culture. This benchmark included tools made by modern apes and tools produced in experiments where humans made flint without experience.
They found that human tool-making can be divided into three broad periods. The oldest tools, made between 3.3 and 1.8 million years ago, required just two to four steps to make. Later, tools became somewhat more complex, averaging four to seven steps until around 600,000 years ago. This intermediate period of work is comparable in complexity to tools made by non-human apes, naive humans, and random peeling experiments, and typically required one to six steps.
During the Middle Pleistocene, about 600,000 years ago, the pace of change accelerated and stone tools became much more complex, with many tools requiring more than 10 steps to complete. By about 300,000 years ago, humans had created technology that was twice as complex as the primitive tools used by modern chimpanzees to hammer open nuts and other objects. Researchers believe this surge in complexity is linked to the origins of a cumulative culture in which ancient humans retained and expanded their knowledge of earlier stone tools.
Dating the cumulative culture back to the Middle Pleistocene is consistent with previous estimates, says Alex Mesoudi, an anthropologist who studies cultural evolution at the University of Exeter in the UK and was not involved in the new paper. But Mesoudi thinks other organic elements of the cumulative culture, like wooden structures, ropes and nets, may be even older. “They may have appeared before the Pleistocene,” he says. [than 600,000 years ago]”But we don’t know because there’s no trace of it in the archaeological record,” he says.
From this period, other hominin species likely passed on cultural insights to future generations. The origins of accumulated culture, according to the new paper, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. This is supported by the overlap in complexity of the two species’ technologies. During the Pleistocene, Neanderthals created tools that required 9-13 steps, and during the Middle Pleistocene, some Neanderthal technologies surpassed human-made tools. For example, Neanderthals created multi-faceted spear points by breaking off several pieces from a stone core. These sharp tools, known as Levallois points, are more complex than human-made blades of the same period.
Cumulative culture may have begun at the same time as the beginning of language in archaic humans. “This may suggest that cumulative culture in technological domains requires language, or that language and cumulative technology co-evolved,” says Mesoudi. “This fits with some of the suggestions that grammatical language and complex tool making share similar cognitive processes.”
