The technological explosion that occurred 600,000 years ago determined the origin of the abilities that made us human | The science

If you look around, you are surrounded by technologies that you probably don’t know how they work, and if you do, you won’t be able to replicate them. And we’re not just talking about complex cell phone chips. The ink that permeates the pages of a book, the synthetic fabric of a T-shirt, or a metal key requires a vast and cumulative amount of knowledge, distributed among many people and resulting from the accumulation of knowledge over countless generations. This ability to receive knowledge from ancestors and pass it on to descendants, adding some…

If you look around, you are surrounded by technologies that you probably don’t know how they work, and if you do, you won’t be able to replicate them. And we’re not just talking about complex cell phone chips. The ink that permeates the pages of a book, the synthetic fabric of a T-shirt, or a metal key requires a vast and cumulative amount of knowledge, distributed among many people and resulting from the accumulation of knowledge over countless generations. This ability to acquire knowledge from ancestors and pass it on to descendants after making some improvements, and to do so with precision, in addition to mass copying of what others do, as observed in chimpanzees and apes, is one of the abilities that still seems exclusive to humanity .

Therefore, the search for the origin of this ability to accumulate culture is also a search for something similar to human origins. Article published this Monday in the magazine PNAS and signed by Jonathan Page of the University of Missouri and Charles Perrault of Arizona State, both in the United States, attempts to identify that decisive moment, which they believe occurred about 600,000 years ago. They arrived at this figure after analyzing stone tools from the past 3.3 million years, comparing the sophistication of tools made by other animals, and conducting experiments in which researchers created stone tools to put themselves in the shoes of these prehistoric humans.

There are indications that more than three million years ago, in places like Dikika in Ethiopia or Lomekwi in Kenya, early hominids used stone artifacts to extract meat from animals. These early tools allowed for improved diets that allowed the body and brain to grow, as well as improved manual skills to create better gadgets. At first, cores and scales were created without much planning, pursuing intuitive utility similar to what some apes today seek to produce scales, not unlike those used by early members of the genus Homo. This way of doing things was passed on for hundreds of thousands of years at a speed that was still nowhere near the speed of the human species.

Change was gradual, with technologies that could be learned with some ease and with little information, simply by watching others do it. The authors even suggest that 1.8 million years ago, after the advent of hand axes, which represented a major technological leap and greater planning, there was a certain stagnation as manual skill was not sufficient to continue the same rapid progress. The situation changed 600,000 years ago. The transformations that begin to appear in the tools of that time, more subtle and varied, require a lot of time to study, and it is possible that stone carving was passed on in the same way as the craft is taught now.

The authors argue that the rapid and persistent increase in complexity can be explained by the ability of these hominids to accumulate culture. There is a greater variety of tools, thread forms and combinations of elements that exponentially multiply the capabilities of technology. As new carving techniques are discovered, design possibilities expand. For example, hammering with a soft hammer and carving under pressure can produce thinner hand axes than is possible with hitting with a hard hammer. These more complex technologies are also more difficult to discover, master, and train.

The evolution of cultural heritage occurs simultaneously with biological changes that promote learning from the earliest stages of life. Cooking, for example, reduced the size of the gut and made it easier to extract more energy to power the brain from the same amount of food. This helps develop a brain that can acquire increasingly complex skills or the dexterity with the fingers needed to build finer devices.

Although the great technological explosion is usually associated with the emergence of modern humans, Page and Perrault suggest that cumulative culture may have predated the split of the Neanderthal and Sapien lineages and that it may have been developed by a common ancestor. “This is reflected in the overlapping complexity of both groups in the late Pleistocene,” they say, and may explain why some researchers believe that technologies associated with Neanderthals in the Middle Pleistocene are more complex than some associated with modern humans at that time. .end of this period.

Ignacio de la Torre, a CSIC researcher, doubts there is conclusive evidence that Neanderthals were capable of developing more advanced gadgets than sapiens, but suggests that “the technological or innovation explosion can be attributed to a kind of precursor Homo sapiens” Although the relationship between archaeological finds and the biology of the creatures that created them is not always clear, and many technologies are so useful that they are passed between species over long periods of time, De la Torre does not rule out that the innovation fever will end up being associated with the presence of the human species with more modern characteristics that have not yet been identified.

“Every four or five years there are new discoveries Homo sapiens older,” he says. “Until 15 years ago, the oldest remains were 100,000 years old. Later, remains from 150,000 years ago emerged, 50% older, and in 2017, remains of modern humans from 300,000 years ago were published. Chronology Homo sapiens in just 15 years,” says De la Torre. “These equivalencies between biology and archeology should be taken with a grain of salt, but who told us that in a few years there will be no remains left Homo sapiens half a million years ago?

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