When development begins

Today, scientists say the leap in complexity of stone tools we find in ancient cultural layers indicates a sudden increase in hominid knowledge. about 600,000 years ago. This will help explain how modern humans and our ancestors became particularly adept at adapting to new conditions.

This is a period that could potentially “predate the divergence of Neanderthals and modern humans, and could be a common derivation of both lineages,” explain anthropologist Jonathan Page of the University of Missouri and Charles Perrault of Arizona State University.

Researchers analyzed stone tool production technologies For 3.3 million years of human evolution. They ranked 62 toolmaking stages in order of complexity for samples found at 57 sites. The oldest artifact comes from Africa, but ancient tools from Eurasia, Greenland, Sahul, Oceania and the Americas were also included in the analysis.

• Page and Perrault found that by 1.8 million years ago the stone tool-making sequence consisted of two to four technological units.
• Over the next 1.2 million years there was an increase in the complexity of tools, reaching seven technological units.
• But only about 600,000 years ago, our ancestors reached a qualitatively new level.

At that time, the complexity of the tool could reach 18 procedure units. Such significant technological progress was based on knowledge passed down from previous generations, that is, accumulated culture. In subsequent generations, the complexity of vehicles continued to increase rapidly.

Cumulative culture is the accumulation of changes, innovations and improvements through social learning over generations.
– Write Page and Perrault in their articles.

Generations of trial-and-error improvements, modifications, and modifications have helped create technology and know-how far beyond what a naive human could invent on his own in his lifetime. When a child inherits the culture of his parents’ generation, he also inherits the result of thousands of years of mistakes and experiments.

Cumulative culture benefits the population in many ways by increasing the chances of solving problems through generations of trial and error, just as evolution does through random mutations and natural selection. It also allows people to use and develop technologies without having to fully understand every aspect of their development, paving the way for an ever-growing and adaptable pool of knowledge.

As this collective knowledge and associated behavior grows, the genes that influence learning may also grow.

The products of this process, in which genes and culture co-evolve, may be an increase in relative brain size, an increase in life expectancy, and other fundamental characteristics that underlie human uniqueness.
– Describe the authors of the work.

Page and Perrault note that although the team’s findings provide strong evidence for the existence of cumulative culture in the early Middle Pleistocene, such cultural intelligence may have emerged much earlier in our evolutionary history but may not have been as easily preserved. Early hominins may also have relied on cumulative culture to develop complex social, nutritional, and technological behaviors that we may not be able to see archaeologically.