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Before Cumulative Culture

The Evolutionary Origins of Overimitation and Shared Intentionality

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Abstract

In the 7 million years or so since humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees we have colonized more of the planet’s terrestrial habitat than any other mammalian species and come to account for more biomass than all other terrestrial vertebrates combined. Chimpanzees, in contrast to and under pressure from ourselves, have veered toward extinction. There are multiple reasons for the stark evolutionary trajectories humans and chimpanzees have taken. Recent theoretical and empirical interest has focused on the emergence of cumulative culture whereby technological innovations are progressively incorporated into a population’s stock of skills and knowledge, generating ever more sophisticated repertoires. Here we look at the role of high-fidelity imitation and intention-reading in the establishment of cumulative culture. By focusing on the lithic record, we aim to identify when in our evolutionary history these skills became part of our ancestors’ behavioral repertoire. We argue that evidence of cooperative construction in stone tool manufacture, along with speculation regarding changes to the mirror neurone system, hint at the foundations of overimitation and shared intentionality around 2 million years ago. However, these are not the only ingredients of cumulative culture, which is why we do not see convincing evidence for it until slightly more than a million years later.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Professors K. Paddayya, Sheila Mishra, and J. N. Pal and the Archaeological Survey of India for access to the archaeological collections discussed and illustrated in this paper. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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  1. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Ceri Shipton

  2. British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

    Ceri Shipton

  3. Early Cognitive Development Centre, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Mark Nielsen

  4. Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Mark Nielsen

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Shipton, C., Nielsen, M. Before Cumulative Culture. Hum Nat 26, 331–345 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-015-9233-8

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