ArticleNature communications2015
Experimental evidence for the co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language.
Article in Nature communications, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 117 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
117 citing papers in PubMed, 569 citations in OpenAlex.
- The co-evolution of hominins and Stone Age culture.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Review
- A continuous record of early human stone tool production.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2026Article
- Analogies evolve by increasing transmission fidelity in the communication of complex information.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Let's talk about "talking" dogs! Reviewing the science behind a bold idea.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- Costs of Early Stone Toolmaking cannot Establish the Presence of Know-how Copying.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Generative artificial intelligence tools in journal article preparation: A preliminary catalog of ethical considerations, opportunities, and pitfalls.JDS communications · 2025Article
- When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- An empirically-based scenario for the evolution of cultural transmission in the human lineage during the last 3.3 million years.PloS one · 2025Article
- The neural underpinnings of repeated skill transfer in human cultural evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Back(s) to basics: The concept of backing in stone tool technologies for tracing hominins' technical innovations.Evolutionary anthropology · 2024Review
- Trade-offs, control conditions, and alternative designs in the experimental study of cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Review
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Models of animal coalitions and their implications for human evolution.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Adapting Ourselves, Instead of the Environment: An Inquiry into Human Enhancement for Function and Beyond.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Article
- Analyzing blank cutting edge efficiency associated with the adoption of microblade technology: A case study from Tolbor-17, Mongolia.PloS one · 2024Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Emergent technological variation in archaeological landscapes: a primate perspective.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Impacts of Development, Dentofacial Disharmony, and Its Surgical Correction on Speech: A Narrative Review for Dental Professionals.Applied sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Quantum Leaps in Human Biocultural Evolution and the Relationship to Cranial Capacity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
57 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Hominin reliance on Oldowan stone tools-which appear from 2.5 mya and are believed to have been socially transmitted-has been hypothesized to have led to the evolution of teaching and language. Here we present an experiment investigating the efficacy of transmission of Oldowan tool-making skills along chains of adult human participants (N=184) using five different transmission mechanisms. Across six measures, transmission improves with teaching, and particularly with language, but not with imitation or emulation. Our results support the hypothesis that hominin reliance on stone tool-making generated selection for teaching and language, and imply that (i) low-fidelity social transmission, such as imitation/emulation, may have contributed to the ~700,000 year stasis of the Oldowan technocomplex, and (ii) teaching or proto-language may have been pre-requisites for the appearance of Acheulean technology. This work supports a gradual evolution of language, with simple symbolic communication preceding behavioural modernity by hundreds of thousands of years.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.