Abstract
The persistence of early stone tool technologies has puzzled archaeologists for decades. Cognitively based explanations, which presume either lack of ability to innovate or extreme conformism, do not account for the totality of the empirical patterns. Following recent research, this study explores the effects of demographic factors on rates of culture change and diversification. We investigate whether the appearance of stability in early Paleolithic technologies could result from frequent extinctions of local subpopulations within a persistent metapopulation. A spatially explicit agent-based model was constructed to test the influence of local extinction rate on three general cultural patterns that archaeologists might observe in the material record: total diversity, differentiation among spatially defined groups, and the rate of cumulative change. The model shows that diversity, differentiation, and the rate of cumulative cultural change would be strongly affected by local extinction rates, in some cases mimicking the results of conformist cultural transmission. The results have implications for understanding spatial and temporal patterning in ancient material culture.
Highlights
The gradual pace of change and relatively low level of diversification in early stone tool technologies is deeply puzzling to archaeologists and paleoanthropologists
Our results suggest that the combination of unbiased transmission and frequent local extinctions can maintain a similar number of unique cultural variants as conformist biased cultural transmission in the absence of local extinctions (Figure 2b)
High rates of local group extinction would have the same effect on total cultural diversity, group differentiation, and the rate of cumulative change as low copying error rates or—at least for some values of m—conformist cultural transmission
Summary
The gradual pace of change and relatively low level of diversification in early stone tool technologies is deeply puzzling to archaeologists and paleoanthropologists. It is widely agreed that both the forms of artifacts and the methods used to make them changed slowly and varied little during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic when compared to later periods [1,2,3,4]. Even comparatively complex ones such as handaxes and Levallois flakes, were produced in a limited array of forms for hundreds of thousands of years. There is a noteworthy diversity in methods for producing flakes and blades, in the Middle Paleolithic (e.g., [5,6,7]). The same or similar artifact forms and methods of production recur again and again at different times and places. It has been difficult to link documented variation in Middle Paleolithic artifact diversity or complexity to environmental factors [9,10] or even hominin species
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