Stability and Change in Paleolithic Toolmaking

• Type of Material: Book Chapter
• Authors: Dietrich Stout, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2024
• Publisher: Emory University Libraries
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547802/the-evolution-of-techniques/
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: The Evolution of Techniques: Rigidity and Flexibility in Use, Transmission, and Innovation
• Start Page: 139
• End Page: 158
• Place of Publication or Presentation: Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Keywords: cultural evolution; cultural norms; economics; information transmission; social media; adaptive flexibility; language; cultural traits; tradition; stable rigidity; incremental modification; change; politics
• Research Categories: Language, Modern; Anthropology, Cultural; Psychology, Social

Abstract

Culture is remarkable in its capacity to sustain both rapid change and enduring traditions. The rise of social media has occasioned a tectonic shift in cultural norms, language, economics, and politics in less than 20 years, and yet schoolchildren still sing nursery rhymes that are hundreds of years old and learn about farm animals few of them will ever encounter. Different cultural evolutionary research traditions have tended to focus on explaining either the adaptive flexibility or the stable rigidity of cultural traits (Sterelny 2017) and thus emphasized either processes of information transmission and incremental modification (Richerson and Boyd 2005; Henrich 2016; Laland 2018) or stabilizing factors of convergent reconstruction (Sperber 1996; Scott-Phillips, Blancke, and Heintz 2018; Strachan et al. 2021). Each of these is clearly relevant to understanding human culture, and many of the disagreements between the two traditions may be more apparent than real (Sterelny 2017). Nevertheless, theoretical emphases do play an important role in generating research questions and framing expectations. This chapter considers how the expectation that humanlike culture is characterized by change and diversification rather than stability and convergence has influenced interpretations of the Paleolithic archaeological record and shaped big-picture hypotheses about human evolution.