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The Island Test for Cumulative Culture in the Paleolithic

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The Nature of Culture

Part of the book series: Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology ((VERT))

Abstract

Early Stone Age artifacts have long been assumed to reflect the material record of communities whose members possessed the ability to transmit ideas, behaviors, and technologies from individual to individual through high-fidelity transmission (i.e., involving teaching and/or imitation) , much like humans do today. Recent experimental work has highlighted marked differences between great apes and modern humans in the capacity and/or motivation for some forms of cultural transmission . In particular, high-fidelity mechanisms of social learning , which are thought to underlie the capacity for cumulative culture , appear to be enhanced in – if not unique to – humans. Taken as a group , these experiments suggest it is plausible that a combination of genetic, environmental, and social factors that do not include high-fidelity social learning mediate the “cultures” described for great ape populations to date. It may be that, while the distribution of great ape behavioral variation in time and space is likely affected by low-fidelity social learning (which is widespread in the animal kingdom), the observed variants were invented (i.e., learned) independently by each individual rather than copied from other individuals. Behaviors that do not require high-fidelity transmission between individuals in order to increase in frequency in a population lie within the so-called “zone of latent solutions .” Here, we begin to grapple with the hypothesis that much of the Early Stone Age archaeological record may reflect deeply “canalized” behaviors of hominin toolmakers – those that reside in each individual’s zone of latent solutions – rather than behaviors that necessarily require high-fidelity transmission between individuals. We explore this possibility while eschewing the simplistic notion that variation in stone tool shape, for example, is entirely determined by the genetic variation found in the toolmakers. Instead, we suggest that the variation observed in Early Stone Age artifacts may simply reflect a heavier reliance on behaviors that reside within the zone of latent solutions than on behaviors that make use of high-fidelity social learning . We discuss a thought experiment, called the Island Test , which may be useful for distinguishing hominin behaviors that require high-fidelity transmission from behaviors that do not. We conclude that the Early Stone Age archaeological record is consistent with the possibility that latent solutions explain the behavioral variation inferred from available material culture . Furthermore, we explore reasons why the assumption of high-fidelity transmission associated with Paleolithic industries is difficult to support.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term “solutions” is used because social learning experiments often focus on physical problems to solve. But the hypothesis may also be called more broadly “zone of latent behavior,” as indeed the theory also entails social behaviors such as “hand-clasp grooming” (Tennie et al. 2009) that may not be best described as “solutions.” Nevertheless, here we stick to the original term so as not to introduce ever more terms.

  2. 2.

    One might object that it may transpire that beaver dams only look complex but may be based on simple iterative wood-placing techniques. The question of complexity in behavior is however a tricky one – and likely relative to the species in question. All that we suggest here is that complexity alone cannot be solid ground for the inference of cumulative culture (Tennie and Hedwig 2009).

  3. 3.

    Also worth mentioning again in this context is that the manufacture of stone tools that look similar by different species is compatible with a ZLS explanation, which does not require further assumptions (i.e., high-fidelity social learning – and thus high tolerance – between different species).

  4. 4.

    And yet, we cannot help but wonder what artifacts would look like if naïve modern humans were to be told to produce stone tools that allow the most effective sequential removal of successive flakes (“thrifty stone tools”). Might we expect even modern humans (given enough practice) to come up with artifact forms that might very well resemble handaxes? If the “handaxes as efficient sources of usable flakes” hypothesis is correct (Ludwig and Harris 1998), this would then explain the form of handaxes (and it would show that handaxes were not only a latent solution at their time, but remain so today). This experiment is unfortunately difficult to do, for various reasons.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank many colleagues who added extensive comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. In particular, we would like to thank A. Mackay and J. Ferraro. We also thank R. Moore, H. Over, and very helpful anonymous reviewers. DRB would like to thank the Humboldt Foundation for support during his stay at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and UCT-URC sabbatical funds. CT would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for support (ES/K008625/1). This paper was initially drafted in 2011 based on our presentation at “The Nature of Culture” symposium. We would like to thank Miriam Haidle, Michael Bolus and Nicholas Conard for their invitation and for seeing this volume through to publication.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    Claudio Tennie

  2. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Claudio Tennie, L. S. Premo & Shannon P. McPherron

  3. Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, Department of Anthropology, George Washington University, 2210 G Street NW, Washington, DC, 20052, USA

    David R. Braun

  4. Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    David R. Braun

  5. Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 99164-4910, USA

    L. S. Premo

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  1. Claudio Tennie
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  4. Shannon P. McPherron
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Correspondence to Claudio Tennie .

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  1. Senckenberg Research Institute, Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany

    Miriam N. Haidle

  2. Department of Early Prehistory and Quate, Institute of Pre- and Protohistory and M, Tübingen, Germany

    Nicholas J. Conard

  3. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Human, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Michael Bolus

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Tennie, C., Braun, D.R., Premo, L.S., McPherron, S.P. (2016). The Island Test for Cumulative Culture in the Paleolithic. In: Haidle, M., Conard, N., Bolus, M. (eds) The Nature of Culture. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7426-0_11

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