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posted by martyb on Friday March 16 2018, @02:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the Moog-want-spear...-Gork-want-axe? dept.

Signs of symbolic behavior emerged at the dawn of our species in Africa

More than 320,000 years ago in the Rift Valley of Africa, some early innovators adopted a new technology: They eschewed the clunky, palm-size stone hand axes that their ancestors had used for more than a million years in favor of a sleek new toolkit. Like new generations of cellphones today, their Middle Stone Age (MSA) blades and points were smaller and more precise than the old so-called Acheulean hand axes and scrapers.

These toolmakers in the Olorgesailie Basin in Kenya chose as raw materials shiny black obsidian and white and green chert, rocks they had to get from distant sources or through trade networks. In another first, they chiseled red and black rocks, probably to use as crayons to color their bodies or spears—an early sign of symbolic behavior. "This is indicative of a gear change in behavior, toolmaking, and material culture," says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who studies social networks.

A trio of papers released online in Science today documents this remarkable technological transition. Although other sites have yielded MSA tools, the new, securely dated chronology nudges the transition back by at least 20,000 years, matching when our species, Homo sapiens, is now thought to have emerged. By analyzing artifacts over time at one site, the papers also show that these behaviors developed as climate swings intensified, supporting the idea that environmental variability drove innovation.

Related:

Environmental dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2200) (DX)

Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2216) (DX)

Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2646) (DX)


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @05:24PM (4 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @05:24PM (#653691) Journal
    I have a 'good guess' narrative that's a bit different. Sorry, it probably won't be as funny as yours.

    People spread out because of overcrowding. This is an extremely rich environment, warm, wet, fertile soil, and life everywhere you look. The food chain is densely filled, all the way from the grubs and insects to the lion. Humans fit in there as food for crocodiles.

    So, crocodiles are dangerous and scary as hell but they pretty much have to catch us unawares to eat us, very few of us are stupid enough not to stay the hell away from a croc, and people that live in croc areas are watchful when near the water. And push come to shove, not one but several warriors, representing a small unit of hunter gatherers, a band, can actually kill the croc. So they tend to snag a very old one here, a very young one there, a particularly stupid one on another day, but they don't really pose a threat to the population as a whole. This wouldn't really be a compelling reason to move by itself, particularly since no matter where you go there are similar dangers. It might make sense to us now as a reason to move, but it wouldn't likely occur to someone born and raised in that environment. It's just a fact of life. Careful near the water. Crocs'll getcha.

    It's a very rich environment but hunter gatherers still tolerate a relatively low level of population pressure before spreading out. If it's not competition for scarce natural resources it's political rivalry, divergent values, etc.

    Tribes only get so big. IIRC the current best guess from psychologists is ~180 people. If we figure average band size is 10, that's roughly 18 bands. As you get significantly larger than that, it works less effectively, internal friction develops, and people leave, either in a trickle or a flood, until it works properly again. In gaming terms, it's a  soft-cap, where once you go over a certain value other mechanics kick in to frustrate further increase.

    So once you combine those two facts, the natural soft-cap on tribal size, and the resource rich environment, the place is tailor made to 'spin-off' tribes. It wouldn't be about resources, because they aren't scarce. The resources relevant at the time were food, wood and plant fibers, leather and stone. All available in abundance just go get them and shape them. You'd never get close to carrying capacity with hunter-gatherers. Everyone would have lots of babies, many of them would live, the population would increase, and in short order there would be 200, 250, maybe 350 folks showing up to party.

    It's just too many, it gets out of control, there are fights and feuds and we've killed all the grass for miles around the spot and everyone complains about it but no one knows what to do, and pretty soon we are polarising into two factions and confronting each other and a few people are injured, quite possibly dead, and it's awful.

    Then, because we're hunter gatherers in a hunter gatherer world, rather than moderns in a modern world, one faction just packs their stuff and takes off. They travel several days away and find a good spot to party, and now both tribes are now working properly, <180 people everyone basically friends and parties are fun again.

    At least for a generation.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 16 2018, @07:27PM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 16 2018, @07:27PM (#653761) Journal

    Except that stone isn't a simple thing. Different varieties of stone are useful for different things, and a lot of it isn't very useful for much of anything if you're a stone age technologist. So trade is important, and the tribes don't stay incommunicado, they're merely separate. The early Hebrews were pastoralist rather than hunter-gatherer, but read the early books of the Bible to get an idea of the plausible social structures. It doesn't really fit, but it's a lot closer than anything you'll have direct experience with. Notice in particular how Cain and Able both found wives who are just not mentioned. Hunter gatherers wouldn't generally be so male dominated, but they also tend to just ignore those outside the tribe as much as possible.

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    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 16 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)

      by Arik (4543) on Friday March 16 2018, @08:47PM (#653793) Journal
      As you say, it depends on what you're doing. For the most part stone was used to make tools. Hammer stones, grinding stones, many sorts of tools can me made from several different types of very common stones. Yes, some are better than others, but not enough you can't get over it. The paleolithic toolkit doesn't really require anything exotic.

      And historically we know that hunter gatherers who lived in areas short on the good stones didn't just trade for them, but often just used replacements. We call it the stone age because that was the predominant tool-making material, but it was never the only one. Very good scrapers and points can be made from bone, from shellfish husks, or tusks from any of several sorts of animals, and in many cases were.

      "The early Hebrews were pastoralist rather than hunter-gatherer, but read the early books of the Bible to get an idea of the plausible social structures. "

      Eh, no, should have stopped before the but. Those are not hunter gatherer social structures.

      "Notice in particular how Cain and Able both found wives who are just not mentioned."

      Why?

      "Hunter gatherers wouldn't generally be so male dominated, but they also tend to just ignore those outside the tribe as much as possible."

      What does 'male dominated' mean to you? That seems a bit of a loaded concept.

      The very term "hunter-gatherer" refers to sex roles and segregation, if that's what you mean. That's the whole basis of their lifestyle, their daily bread. The specifics vary a lot but the general pattern is pretty clear. The women group together, sing songs and beat sticks and whatever to warn the animals away from them, and collect useful plant products and other such inanimate objects. The men spread out in the bush, silently, trying to catch something tasty. The two groups meet back up later and pool their resources for a hot meal, but their daily working day is very different and rigidly segregated.

      They're traditionalists, not authoritarians, so there may well be tolerance for exceptions (there's a very widespread and clearly ancient shamanic tradition that was tied to opting out of the male hunter role for example) but all evidence suggests that this been the basic pattern for hundreds of thousands of years, up until pastoralism and agriculture started to develop.

      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday March 17 2018, @01:06AM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday March 17 2018, @01:06AM (#653889) Journal

        Have you ever tried to knap sandstone? It can't be done. Glass, OTOH, works well (so obsidian was prized. Flint occurs in lots of places, but not everywhere.

        And, yes, if you don't have and can't get a decent stone, you use something else. But if you can trade for something better, you will. And not just for tools. We know the amber route reached from Northern Europe to the Middle East during the stone age. Possibly even during the Old Stone Age. We call it the stone age because stone was durable and left tracks, where wood, twine, cloth, etc. decayed rapidly, and left few tracks. This doesn't prove that stone was the dominant tool, I suspect that wood was, it proves that it's the most durable tool.

        You are right that pastoralist isn't the same social structure as hunter-gatherer. Pastoralists, e.g., tend to be male dominated due to wealth being measured in herds. But the early pastoralists are essentially tribal, and that's a lot more similar to hunter-gatherer than anything modern.

        What I meant by less male dominated wasn't that the different sexes didn't have different roles, but rather that the appraisal of the value of the roles was less lop-sided. And this is, of course, only a general rule, I'm certain that there were exceptions. What we know of hunter-gatherers today is based on groups surviving in marginal territories, and probably doesn't reflect the original groups. The original groups would have been in more danger from animal predators and less from human predators. And would be on technological par with other groups they encountered. But the myth structures we build about what life was like at that time seem to be quite at odds with what is known of surviving groups. You could extrapolate from the baboon troops, but that wouldn't seem very likely either.

        According to the anthropologists among the Kalahari bushmen women frequently beat up their husbands. (Not, of course, as frequently as the other way around. Size makes a difference.) This would seem to imply a rough level of social equality.

        OTOH, traditionalist societies are, if anything, less tolerant of exceptional behavior than authoritarian societies. In authoritarian societies you need to show that it's to the benefit of the authority. In traditionalist societies you need to show that it's the way of the ancestors.

        FWIW, it's important to remember that the tertiary were a secondary culture. First was the hunter-gatherers, then the agriculturalists, and only then the pastoralists. You've got to domesticate animals before you can be a pastoralist. That happened (except for dogs) during the agricultural period. (Don't think only of the large agricultural civilizations. Think of isolated villages that formed when a tribe of hunter-gatherers found a good place to settle. Which they did occasionally. The oldest ones seem to be near beds of shellfish, but those don't seem to be where agriculturalists originated.

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        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:52AM

          by Arik (4543) on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:52AM (#653918) Journal
          "Have you ever tried to knap sandstone? "

          You can't. Which is why you don't make points or scrapers from sandstone. I said that.

          "What I meant by less male dominated wasn't that the different sexes didn't have different roles, but rather that the appraisal of the value of the roles was less lop-sided."

          Which means you think they are lop-sided towards males in general, so as I suspected, very loaded wording, reflecting prejudice.

          "According to the anthropologists among the Kalahari bushmen women frequently beat up their husbands. (Not, of course, as frequently as the other way around. Size makes a difference.) This would seem to imply a rough level of social equality."

          That's an interesting yardstick, which leads to the opposite conclusion from where you took it. In modern western countries in recent years, women beat up their husbands *more* often than the other way around, so by your standards is this a female dominated society? Is that a problem?

          "OTOH, traditionalist societies are, if anything, less tolerant of exceptional behavior than authoritarian societies. In authoritarian societies you need to show that it's to the benefit of the authority. In traditionalist societies you need to show that it's the way of the ancestors."

          Nonsense. In an authoritarian society there are, as the name implies, authorities. Armed men that will come and get you for violating the rules.

          In a traditional society there is no one in that role. If you offend tradition, then people may be offended, but no one has any special role or rights of enforcement to kidnap you or kill you over that. If you convince the people you need to deal with you're alright, then you're alright, and the traditions that the next generation inherit are a little different as a result.

          "FWIW, it's important to remember that the tertiary were a secondary culture. First was the hunter-gatherers, then the agriculturalists, and only then the pastoralists. "

          "You've got to domesticate animals before you can be a pastoralist. That happened (except for dogs) during the agricultural period. "

          Domesticating animals was something that happened over a very long period of time, not in a flash. As you pre-emptively admit, dogs were certainly domesticated long before there was any farming. Since we don't know (and wouldn't expect to know, given the methods we have to use) exactly when each one was first practiced, so we can't say for certain which one was practiced first, your implication of going from one to another is clearly wrong. Pastoralists didn't go through an agriculturalist stage then progress to pastoralism, I can't think of a single example of that happening, while pastoralists do settle down and become agriculturalists frequently. Historically, in the ME and elsewhere, the agriculturalists densely occupy arable land around the rivers while the pastoralists occupy a much larger surrounding area, much less densely. Some years the herds outgrow the food available in these peripheral areas and then the herdsmen show up raiding, stealing, feeding their crops in the fields before they could be harvested and so on. Later still, the most powerful of the pastoralists will begin overthrowing settled lands and settling as rulers - for instance in Babylon. But there's nothing I'm aware of that indicates either group predates the other. They seem to have developed over the same time period, in neighboring but distinct areas.
          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?