Early humans appear to have experienced a sudden and rapid advance in technology around 600,000 years ago, according to new findings from a team of anthropologists investigating the use of ancient stone tools.
The researchers behind the findings say it likely represents a key inflection point in the evolution of ancient humanity, where the transmission of ancient knowledge from generation to generation, known as cumulative culture, led to increasing advances in society that fueled humanity’s biological, cultural and technological development.
“Our species, Homo sapiens, has successfully adapted to ecological conditions — from tropical forests to arctic tundra — that require solving different kinds of problems,” said Associate Professor Charles Perreault, an anthropologist at Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution. and social change. and researcher at the Institute of Human Origins. “Cumulative culture is key because it allows the human population to build on the solutions of previous generations and recombine them to develop new complex solutions to problems very quickly.”
Tool making suddenly underwent a rapid advance in technology
In their published study, “3.3 Million Years of Stone Tool Complexity Suggests Cumulative Culture Began During the Middle Pleistocene,” which appears in the journal PNAS, Perreault and co-author Jonathan Paige, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, explain how their analysis of the stone tools from 3.3 million years ago revealed this sudden and unexpected technological leap.
The researchers analyzed tools collected from 57 separate ancient hominin sites. The oldest tool, more than 3 million years old, came from an African site. However, scientists have also studied ancient stone tools discovered in ancient hominins in Eurasia, Greenland, Sahul, Oceania and the Americas.
Next, the team evaluated the complexity of the tools. This meant analyzing how many steps would be required to create the respective tool. The researchers characterized and sequenced 62 different tool-making sequences.
After mapping the complexity of the tools, the team saw some unexpected patterns. Tools made 3.3 million years ago and 1.8 million years ago required two to four process units to produce. The complexity of stone tools increased steadily over the next 1.2 million years, with the top specimens requiring an impressive seven steps. While they are significantly more complex than tools made more than a million years ago, the researchers say this is still within the range of complexity for a single craftsman. This means that knowledge from previous generations of tool makers was most likely not passed on during this period.
But the researchers found that when they looked at tools made about 600,000 years ago, in the Middle Pleistocene, they began to see a sudden and unexpected increase in complexity. The tools of this era were not only more complex, but more complex manufacturing processes were required to make these tools.
“We analyzed stone tools made over the last 3.3 million years,” the researchers explain. “We found that these stone tools remained simple until 600,000 BP. After that, their complexity increased rapidly.”
While earlier tools required only a handful of process steps to produce, tools from this era often required as many as 18 steps. According to Paige and Perreault, these are too many steps for one generation of artisans to achieve without the knowledge passed down from previous generations.
This evidence, the researchers write, is consistent with the findings of other research teams, suggesting that such a rapid transition “signals the development of cumulative culture in the human lineage.”
“About 600,000 years ago, hominin populations began to rely on unusually complex technologies, and after that time we also see a rapid increase in complexity,” Paige said. “Both of these findings are consistent with what we expect to see among hominins who rely on cumulative culture.”
The dawn of cumulative culture and the evolution of modern humans
Although the development of stone tool production provides evidence for the dawn of a cumulative culture, the researchers behind the findings argue that such a leap likely affected all aspects of early humans. This probably involved changes in human culture, biology, and even the ability to adapt to the range of environments and habitats found around the world.
“Human dependence on cumulative culture may have shaped the evolution of biological and behavioral traits in the hominin lineage,” Paige and Perreault explain, “including brain size, body size, life history, sociality, subsistence, and ecological niche expansion.”
These changes can increase in complexity as genetic and cultural evolution occur concurrently. According to the researchers, this “process of gene-culture co-evolution” can explain the increase in relative brain size, extended life history and other key traits that underlie human uniqueness.
Notably, the researchers point out that the Middle Pleistocene shows many other examples of evolving technology. For example, studies from this period reveal consistent evidence for the controlled use of fire, hearths, and other domestic spaces. This era also marks the evolution of wooden structures constructed from logs carved with hooked tools, which the researchers explain “are stone blades attached to wooden or bone handles.”
In their conclusion, Paige and Perreault note that tool production is only one measure of cumulative culture, and further studies could record other increases in this behavior that may have occurred in the past but are not immediately apparent in the archaeological record. “It is possible that early hominins relied on cumulative culture to develop complex social, foraging, and technological behaviors that are invisible archaeologically,” they write.
Ultimately, the research team believes their findings show how knowledge can be passed down from generation to generation without each successive generation having to rediscover the knowledge of the past. When enough knowledge is passed down, as apparently happened 600,000 years ago, this process can result in an ever-increasing and adaptive knowledge pool that allows for a consistent upswing in cultural and technological evolution.
“Generations of improvements, modifications, and lucky mistakes can generate technologies and know-how far beyond what a naive individual could independently invent in a lifetime,” the researchers conclude. “When a child inherits the culture of his parents’ generation, he inherits the result of thousands of years of happy mistakes and experiments.”
“As a result, our cultures—from technological problems and solutions to how we organize our institutions—are too complex for individuals to invent on their own,” adds Perreault.
Christopher Plain is a science fiction and fantasy writer and senior science writer at The Debrief. Follow him and connect with him X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.