ArticleScientific reports2017
Teaching to make stone tools: new experimental evidence supporting a technological hypothesis for the origins of language.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Costs of Early Stone Toolmaking cannot Establish the Presence of Know-how Copying.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Back(s) to basics: The concept of backing in stone tool technologies for tracing hominins' technical innovations.Evolutionary anthropology · 2024Review
- Lessons for Theory from Scientific Domains Where Evidence is Sparse or Indirect.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- The cultural evolution of teaching.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- The evolution of hierarchically structured communication.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Early knapping techniques do not necessitate cultural transmission.Science advances · 2022Article
- Stone toolmaking difficulty and the evolution of hominin technological skills.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The architecture of creditions: Openness and otherness.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Obtaining new resolutions in carnivore tooth pit morphological analyses: A methodological update for digital taphonomy.PloS one · 2020Article
- Cultural transmission in a food preparation task: The role of interactivity, innovation and storytelling.PloS one · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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