Since its foundation in 1937, the Institute of Archaeology has been an important centre of research on Pleistocene environments and Palaeolithic archaeology. Frederick Zeuner (loA: 1937-1963) was greatly respected for his teaching and research on the subject, including his 1945 publication The Pleistocene period and John Waechter (loA: 1954-1978) for his Palaeolithic excavations at Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar and Swanscombe in the Thames Valley. Mark Newcomer (loA: 1973-1989) inspired many of the students with his experimental research on prehistoric bone and flint technology and for his innovative work on the microwear analysis of flint tools. In 1982, Mark Roberts began his excavations at the Lower Palaeolithic site of Boxgrove in Sussex and more recently Matthew Pope has been involved in an extensive survey of the Middle Pleistocene raised beaches along the south Sussex coast. Simon Parfitt has been undertaking groundbreaking research into the Lower Palaeolithic of East Anglia.

The present paper provides an integrative theory of actions and motor programs for skill in tool use, construction, and language. We analyze preconditions for action as well as making their effects (postconditions) explicit, emphasizing the “how” of action details as well as the “what” of motor programs, aided by conceptual analysis of several brain modeling efforts. The theory is exemplified by analysis of the subtractive construction involved in percussive tooling by capuchin monkeys and Oldowan and Acheulean stone tool making by protohumans before turning to the additive construction of hafted tools. A complementary analysis focused on the construction of bird nests explores the notion of “image” and “stage” in construction. We offer a brief comparison with birdsong before arguing for a very different relation between communication and construction in humans. Pantomime lifts manipulation from practical to communicative action in protohumans, and we consider the role of pedagogy before offering hypotheses on the emergence of human language that suggest how language may have evolved from manual skills. We note that language provides an open-ended means for devising innovations in tool use and construction, but reiterate the importance of this framework for diverse future studies in ethology and comparative psychology.

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.

Distinctive human behaviors from tool-making to language are thought to rely on a uniquely evolved capacity for hierarchical action sequencing. Unfortunately, testing of this idea has been hampered by a lack of objective, generalizable methods for measuring the structural complexity of real-world behaviors. Here we present a data-driven approach for quantifying hierarchical structure by extracting action grammars from basic ethograms. We apply this method to the evolutionarily-relevant behavior of stone tool-making by comparing sequences from the experimental replication of ˜2.5 Mya Oldowan vs. more recent ˜0.5 Mya Achuelean tools. Results show that, while using the same “alphabet” of elementary actions, Acheulean sequences are structurally more complex. Beyond its specific evolutionary implications, this finding illustrates the broader applicability of our method to investigate the structure of naturalistic human behaviors and cognition. We demonstrate one application by using our complexity measures to re-analyze data from an fMRI study of tool-making action observation.

The capacity of Homo sapiens for the intergenerational accumulation of complex technologies, practices, and beliefs is central to contemporary accounts of human distinctiveness. However, the actual antiquity and evolutionary origins of cumulative culture are not known. Here we propose and exemplify a research program for studying the origins of cumulative culture using archaeological evidence. Our stepwise approach disentangles assessment of the observed fidelity of behavior reproduction from inferences regarding required learning mechanisms (e.g., teaching, imitation) and the explanation of larger-scale patterns of change. It is empirically grounded in technological analysis of artifact assemblages using well-validated experimental models. We demonstrate with a case study using a toolmaking replication experiment to assess evidence of behavior copying across three 2.6 Ma Oldowan sites from Gona, Ethiopia. Results fail to reveal any effects of raw material size, shape, quality, or reduction intensity that could explain the observed details of intersite technological variation in terms of individual learning across different local conditions. This supports the view that relatively detailed copying of toolmaking methods was already a feature of Oldowan technological reproduction at ca. 2.6 Ma. We conclude with a discussion of prospects and implications for further research on the evolution of human cumulative culture.

Throughout its own history, cognitive science has paid little interest to the historical dimension of its key topic. Most cognitive scientists tended to treat cognition as if it always and everywhere were the same (Bender, 2019). But present-day cognition in humans (as well as in any other species for that matter) is a product of evolution – sometimes of different kinds of evolution – and has been subject to substantial change (Heyes, 2018). About 6 million years ago, the human line dissociated from its closest relatives, setting off on a different evolutionary track. Several hundred thousand years ago, early Homo sapiens learned to control fire, invented complex compound tools such as bow and arrow, and began to use abstract symbols and language (Wadley, 2013). Even today, these achievements strike us as truly impressive, yet they also raise tantalizing questions: What made them possible? Did they emerge all of a sudden, subsequent to genetic mutations, or did they emerge gradually, through cultural cumulation? Which factors spurred them on, which role(s) did culture play in this, and how are these innovations linked to language?

The human faculty for object-mediated action, including tool use and imitation, exceeds that of even our closest primate relatives and is a key foundation of human cognitive and cultural uniqueness. In humans and macaques, observing object-directed grasping actions activates a network of frontal, parietal, and occipitotemporal brain regions, but differences in human and macaque activation suggest that this system has been a focus of selection in the primate lineage. To study the evolution of this system, we performed functional neuroimaging in humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees. We compare activations during performance of an object-directed manual grasping action, observation of the same action, and observation of a mimed version of the action that consisted of only movements without results. Performance and observation of the same action activated a distributed frontoparietal network similar to that reported in macaques and humans. Like humans and unlike macaques, these regions were also activated by observing movements without results. However, in a direct chimpanzee/human comparison, we also identified unique aspects of human neural responses to observed grasping. Chimpanzee activation showed a prefrontal bias, including significantly more activity in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, whereas human activation was more evenly distributed across more posterior regions, including significantly more activation in ventral premotor cortex, inferior parietal cortex, and inferotemporal cortex. This indicates a more “bottom-up” representation of observed action in the human brain and suggests that the evolution of tool use, social learning, and cumulative culture may have involved modifications of frontoparietal interactions.

Although stone tools generally co-occur with early members of the genus Homo, they are rarely found in direct association with hominins. We report that both Acheulian and Oldowan artifacts and Homo erectus crania were found in close association at 1.26 million years (Ma) ago at Busidima North (BSN12), and ca. 1.6 to 1.5 Ma ago at Dana Aoule North (DAN5) archaeological sites at Gona, Afar, Ethiopia. The BSN12 partial cranium is robust and large, while the DAN5 cranium is smaller and more gracile, suggesting that H. erectus was probably a sexually dimorphic species. The evidence from Gona shows behavioral diversity and flexibility with a lengthy and concurrent use of both stone technologies by H. erectus, confounding a simple “single species/single technology” view of early Homo.

Human behaviors from toolmaking to language are thought to rely on a uniquely evolved capacity for hierarchical action sequencing. Testing this idea will require objective, generalizable methods for measuring the structural complexity of real-world behavior. Here we present a data-driven approach for extracting action grammars from basic ethograms, exemplified with respect to the evolutionarily relevant behavior of stone toolmaking. We analyzed sequences from the experimental replication of ~ 2.5 Mya Oldowan vs. ~ 0.5 Mya Acheulean tools, finding that, while using the same “alphabet” of elementary actions, Acheulean sequences are quantifiably more complex and Oldowan grammars are a subset of Acheulean grammars. We illustrate the utility of our complexity measures by re-analyzing data from an fMRI study of stone toolmaking to identify brain responses to structural complexity. Beyond specific implications regarding the co-evolution of language and technology, this exercise illustrates the general applicability of our method to investigate naturalistic human behavior and cognition.

Culture suffuses all aspects of human life. It shapes our minds and bodies and has provided a cumulative inheritance of knowledge, skills, institutions, and artifacts that allows us to truly stand on the shoulders of giants. No other species approaches the extent, diversity, and complexity of human culture, but we remain unsure how this came to be. The very uniqueness of human culture is both a puzzle and a problem. It is puzzling as to why more species have not adopted this manifestly beneficial strategy and problematic because the comparative methods of evolutionary biology are ill suited to explain unique events. Here, we develop a more particularistic and mechanistic evolutionary neuroscience approach to cumulative culture, taking into account experimental, developmental, comparative, and archaeological evidence. This approach reconciles currently competing accounts of the origins of human culture and develops the concept of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.