20 research outputs found
The precision of water content estimates in the thermoluminescence dating of loess from northern Pakistan
Pleistocene and Palaeolithic investigations in the Soan Valley, Northern Pakistan
25.00; Also numbered as British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan Series 2SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:1863.1873(BAR-IS--544) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
International Specialist Seminar on Thermoluminescence and Electron Spin Resonance Dating
Infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) dating of late-Holocene aeolian sands in the Mojave Desert, California, USA
Experimental evidence for the co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language
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