Abstract
The relationship between lithic technology, learning and language is a topic of growing interest in human evolution studies, and has therefore been the subject of numerous scientific papers in recent years. To evaluate the role of language in the social transmission of lithic technology, we designed and developed an experimental protocol through which we compared the acquisition of knapping skills in thirty non-experts in the early stages of learning, by means of three mechanisms of social transmission: imitation-emulation, gestural communication, and verbal communication. All the apprentice knappers carried out the experimental task with blanks that were equal in shape and size, and were requested to replicate what the expert knapper was doing: the alternating method, a sufficiently simple, but systematic technique for detaching flakes from a core. We analysed each participant’s actions, including those of the master knapper, the final products (flakes and cores), and the knapping sequences, by analysing the refits. Our results show that the apprentices improved their knapping skills in teaching conditions -both gestural and verbal communication-, and specially through the latter. In conclusion, our study supports the hypothesis of co-evolution between lithic technology and social learning, which could have favoured the emergence of verbal language.
Highlights
Complex lithic technological capacity and language compete with each other to be the insignia of human intelligence, due to their cognitive implications
Language and the production of Acheulian tools have been shown to cause the same lateralization of blood flow in the brain[23]. This body of study comprises evidence supporting the technological hypothesis of the origin of language, and the technological pedagogy hypothesis[6], which contends that intentional pedagogical demonstration may have spurred the evolution of the verbal communication[24]
The Correspondence Analysis shows the distribution for the apprentices and the expert knapper based on the number and type of actions performed at each phase of the experiment (Fig. 1)
Summary
Complex lithic technological capacity and language compete with each other to be the insignia of human intelligence, due to their cognitive implications. While stone tools have remained more or less unchanged in the archaeological record and act as a window into the behaviour of pre-modern hominins[1], language does not fossilise This means indirect approaches are necessary to approximate this capacity in extinct hominins[2,3,4]. Some ethnographic studies have reinforced the relationship between lithic technology and language, emphasising the social character of knapping in current human communities[28,29,30,31,32,33]. Interaction is a key component of the knapping learning process, especially for transmitting complex technological concepts[31]
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