Hunting and Hunting Technologies as Proxy for Teaching and Learning During the Stone Age of Southern Africa

Abstract

Human hunting represents one of the most difficult foraging activities. It is a skill-intensive pursuit with an extended learning process. Different from other animals, Stone Age hunter-gatherers used complex strategies and technologies to outsmart and pursue their prey. Such strategies and technologies were grounded in extensive knowledge that facilitated context-specific solutions during different phases of weapon production and hunting. Apart from subsistence behaviour, Stone Age hunting technologies also inform on a suite of associated skills, behaviours and levels of cognition. At least since the start of the Holocene in southern Africa, and probably much earlier, behaviours associated with hunting permeated almost every sphere of hunter-gatherer life, and I argue that the theme is a suitable angle from which to explore broader aspects of the evolution of teaching and learning. I provide a brief overview and broad timeline of the ‘evolution’ of hunting technologies associated with the southern African Stone Age record and present some ethnographic hunter-gatherer examples of teaching and learning associated with hunting. The aim is to start situating the archaeological and ethnographic data within a theoretical framework of teaching and learning evolution.