Chapter 10

Stone Tools: Evidence of Something in Between Culture

and Cumulative Culture?

Iain Davidson

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.

Keywords Tradition Artifacts Primates Early hominins Learning Oldowan Acheulean Levallois Mousterian

Introduction

For the symposium that was the source of the papers in the volume, I was asked to write about stone tools in the evolution of culture. I was specifically asked to put my presentation into the context of some hierarchical models of

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.

I. Davidson (&)

School of Humanities, University of New England, 10 Cluny Rd, Armidale, NSW 2350, Australia

e-mail: [e-mail]

and

Department of Archaeology, Flinders University of South Australia, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001, Australia

culture produced by the ROCEEH project. In this paper, I will confine myself to issues relevant to that question, but will propose a variation on one of the ROCEEH models.

What Is Culture?

The plausible claim that non-human animals have culture (Laland 2008) presents a challenge and an opportunity to anthropologists (sensu lato). On the one hand there seems to be a challenge to the uniqueness of humans as culturebearing organisms, and the frisson of excitement among those who have found culture in other animals that they have, rather cheekily, disturbed one of the central tenets of another discipline. On the other hand there is an opportunity to see how the uniquely human aspects of culture emerged through evolutionary processes to produce the situation familiar to any first year student of anthropology (Herrmann et al. 2007).

The proposition of this paper is that the Last Common Ancestor (LCA) of humans and chimpanzees had something more like those behaviors that are called chimpanzee culture than those that are like human culture. The addition of stone tools did not initially make much difference to that situation, and the period over which this was true was probably longer than is generally recognized. But the acts involved in making and using stone tools were one of the selective contexts in which cognitive change took place and made a difference to survival prospects such that expanded populations with the new cognition were capable of sustaining innovations and expanding into new environments. This paper concentrates on using the methodology applied to the identification of ape culture to the early record of stone tools. Consideration of the cognitive implications will be presented elsewhere.

The fundamental issues are ones of definition. We cannot avoid them. On one hand are social and cultural anthropologists who emphasize that people living in societies produce values and pass them on in ways which have fundamental

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

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Miriam N. Haidle, Nicholas J. Conard and Michael Bolus (eds.), The Nature of Culture:

Based on an Interdisciplinary Symposium ‘The Nature of Culture’, Tübingen, Germany,

Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology, DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-7426-0_10

100	I. Davidson

influence on all aspects of society, whether they appear to be part of that value system or not (e.g., Kuper 1999). On the other are biologists who consider that such values are just a special case of the more general set of conditions for learning and constraining behavior (Bonner 1980; Enquist and Ghirlanda 2007). Some have advocated studying living animal species by concentrating on the relative importance of social and asocial learning (Laland and Janik 2006), removing the issue from the question of values. It is this conflict that needs to be addressed by archaeologists looking at the evolution of culture. We might do this in two ways: one, by assuming that apes have culture, and so the common ancestor (whenever that was) would also have had culture and in consequence, investigating the different ways in which culture changed during the process by which hominins and apes evolved in separate directions; the second, by taking a strict anthropological view that culture involves values (socially defined such that, for example, good values are determined by comparison with bad ones; see for example Kuper 1999:57–58) and consider how such values could have emerged from the “almost-culture” of the Last Common Ancestor. I prefer the second course of action (Noble and Davidson 1996).

Original Definitions

The concept of culture has a long history in many disciplines including anthropology (Bennett 2005) and the variation in meaning ranges from its early use in association with agriculture (Goddard 2005) to that associated with “High” culture: “culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,” (Arnold 1869) – what I call “the Sydney Opera House (SOH)” sense of the word culture. The definition may have been produced a long time ago, but this sense underlies most modern vernacular uses of the word. The original anthropological definition was given a year after Arnold by Tylor (1870): “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” such that the much more ethnocentric SOH definition can be considered a special case of Tylor’s, which was more comprehensive (assuming he included woman with man).

For both of these nineteenth century definitions, many of the criteria of recognition cannot be identified either for archaeology or for ethology of non-humans since both studies have no access to the thoughts, sayings, beliefs and intentions of the actors concerned. There is no sign that either chimpanzees or orangutans evaluate their behavior in order

to pursue the “best” or to distinguish individual or small groups within the larger group. The exception to this generalization can be found in some incidents in chimpanzee social interaction at Gombe that involved dominance displays (Goodall 1986:426–427). The best documented is the use by Mike of kerosene tins to startle other chimpanzees while grooming,1 and his switch to other objects when the tins were removed. Most remarkably for this discussion, the adolescent Figan was twice seen appearing to practise using tins in such a display, but he never actually used them (Goodall 1986:426). It may be that what this example demonstrates is that the “pursuit of the best” definition really needs to be qualified by saying that the best can be recognized (or evaluated) because it is achieved by successive members of the society, who learned to behave in the appropriate way, with minor variations on the excellence of performance. The chimpanzee examples might not be included in that definition – it is moot, for example, whether they could evaluate the merits of one grooming hand-clasp (McGrew and Tutin 1978) against another. Of course, the capacity of humans to represent particular examples of behavior as “the best” is a product of symbolic representation of value, since that judgment depends on convention and is to an extent arbitrary. Whether Mike’s successful use of kerosene tins can be considered peak performance, or Figan’s unconsummated practice could be regarded as a step towards “the best”, it remains difficult to use the Arnold definition (or modern, vernacular variants of it) in seeking to identify the evolutionary emergence of culture.

Both archaeologists and ethologists, therefore, have turned to another set of definitions, particularly those collected by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963). This collection formed the basis for an argument to the effect that some behaviors of chimpanzees differed so much between the populations in Gombe and Mahale that they involved social custom (McGrew and Tutin 1978) (Table 10.1). Then and later, McGrew stopped just short of claiming that chimpanzees had culture (e.g., McGrew 1992), but became more certain (McGrew 2004) when the debate among ethologists shifted (Whiten et al. 1999, 2001). When Davidson and McGrew (2005) extended these criteria to the consideration of early hominin stone tools, it seemed possible that by the same criteria, culture was not readily identified for Oldowan industries.

Various alternative discussions have been offered, including, for example, on the one hand those that recommend abandoning the static concept of culture in favor of understanding how infant apes acquire shared meanings

1I 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.