Abstract
This paper goes back to some first principles about what culture might be and how it can be investigated in order to ask questions about the Last Common Ancestor and the role of stone tools in changing the nature of culture. In doing so it considers the relations between learned behavior , tradition , culture, cumulative culture , and cultures: I juxtapose models used by ROCEEH with an alternative model that shows how creatures which can be argued to have such behaviors, and thus the behaviors are related to each other through time and across the animal world.
Dedication
In memory of Lewis Binford, whose many contributions about the nature of culture informed us all and stimulated us to think more carefully about the way we do archaeology. I particularly remember his phrase “tool-assisted animal behavior” as a way of thinking about early hominins. It inspires many of the thoughts in this paper.
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Notes
- 1.
I am very grateful to both Bill McGrew and Barbara King who independently drew my attention to the example of Mike clattering kerosene cans. I am sure they would not want me to bind them to the use I have made of the example.
- 2.
The archaeologically well-known name Olduvai has recently been shown to have been a corruption of the original Maasai name Oldupai.
- 3.
Since this paper went to the publisher, tool use for food acquisition has been reported (Kinani and Zimmerman 2014) among free-living mountain gorillas.
- 4.
This term was used in the original ROCEEH model and derives from Tomasello (1999) to refer to the characteristic of human culture (C-C) that cultural knowledge does not always need to be re-invented but can build up from one generation to another.
- 5.
This word is an unfortunate neologism and could promote a conflation of the well-established concepts of habitat and niche. It is unfortunate because it is arguable that early hominins were enabled to expand their habitat while retaining the same niche, but that aspects of culture enabled them to change their niche and thus to move into habitats that were otherwise unavailable. Failure to distinguish these separate processes by referring instead to expansion of ecospace seriously threatens a project aimed at understanding the roles of culture in hominin adaptation.
- 6.
Sahul is the name that has been given to the continent which includes the islands of New Guinea, Tasmania and the mainland Australia. Since these islands are principally separated during the brief interglacial periods (as now) Sahul is their normal condition.
- 7.
Pat Shipman kindly drew my attention to the importance of the discovery of the Šipka mandible in stratigraphic context which established the association of Neandertals and the Mousterian.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Miriam Haidle and Nick Conard for the invitation to the conference and all the conference participants for their friendly discussion and disagreements. Among those from whom I have received important guidance on issues related to this paper are Phil Barnard, Miriam Belmaker, Rob Gargett, Barbara King, Bill McGrew, Mark Moore, Kimberley Newman, April Nowell, and Pat Shipman. Kimberley Newman prepared the final version of the figures. I thank them all.
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Davidson, I. (2016). Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in Between Culture and Cumulative Culture?. In: Haidle, M., Conard, N., Bolus, M. (eds) The Nature of Culture. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7426-0_10
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