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Investigating the evolution of human social learning through collaborative experimental archaeology

When and how did our ancestors evolve the capacity for prosocial cooperation? Was cumulative culture influential in the evolutionary success of the human lineage? How did different kinds of teaching and learning influence hominin skill acquisition and toolmaking abilities? Increasingly, researchers in human evolutionary studies are realizing the importance that cultural evolution played in shaping humanity. Indeed the ways in which humans cooperate with non-kin, for example, via food-sharing, allo-parenting, hunting, and elderly care, is a defining characteristic distinguishing our species from other primates. Some even argue that extreme prosocial cooperation enabled humans to become Earth's most widely dispersed and biologically successful species. While social and demographic models of human cultural evolution can have high explanatory potential in investigating these questions, they tend to have weak empirical support. The archaeological record, material and time-transgressive in nature, has the potential to provide the empirical data necessary to document the actual processes that took place and to put those events on a calibrated timeline (cf. Perreault). It is clear that we need to study the material cultural remains of early humans and their ancestors to address the questions above. But it is less clear how we go about theorizing, measuring, and ultimately interpreting the archaeological record to achieve these aims. The stakes are high for the case of the Paleolithic: stone artifacts may shed light on hominin mobility patterns, brain growth and evolution, biomechanical coordination, and skill acquisition. Such processes likely had cascading effects on hominin social tolerance, cognition, and language abilities, traits that likely enhanced human evolutionary success. Despite their potential, interpreting stone tool assemblages remains challenging and controversial. We grapple with outdated and quasi-narrative explanations and research orientations, imprecisely understood interobserver variability, weak or unclear cross-disciplinary research aims, and interpretations ungrounded by actualistic or experimental evidence. These issues hamper archaeologists' use of stone tools to address the field's “big questions.”