![]() Positions range from the view that Oldowan tool making indicates a major development in hominin cognition 8, such as teaching or language 12, to the hypothesis that chimpanzee-like emulation or imitation (reproducing the object manipulations or motor patterns of others, respectively) is sufficient to transmit knapping technology 13. ![]() Whether Oldowan stone tool making has implications for the evolution of human language and teaching (defined as active information donation 9) is debated 10, 11. ![]() This work supports a gradual evolution of language, with simple symbolic communication preceding behavioural modernity by hundreds of thousands of years. 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. Across six measures, transmission improves with teaching, and particularly with language, but not with imitation or emulation. 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. 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. ![]()
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