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Experiment on the the co-evolution of tool making, teaching, and language

An experiment in which researchers wanted to examine the role of teaching and communication in the transmission of toolmaking.

Link to teaching material

Teaching material type Experiment, Worksheet

Subject Areas Biology, History, Human Evolution

Suitable Grade Levels 6-8, 9-12

Concepts Language, Social Learning, Teaching, Tool making

Content Anchors Ancient Ancestors

Author: Susan Hanisch

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike [CC BY-NC-SA]

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Related Literature

Experimental evidence for the co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language

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Morgan, T. J. H., Uomini, N. T., Rendell, L. E., Chouinard-Thuly, L., Street, S. E., Lewis, H. M., … Laland, K. N. (2015). Experimental evidence for the co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language. Nature Communications, 6, 1–8. http://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7029

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.

OpenEvo is an educational innovation project from the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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