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Stone tools and the uniqueness of human culture
(based on a paper written with Bill McGrew, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio)
Semester I 2004
(Education Room 108, 17 May 2004, 12 noon)
Abstract
There is a strong movement to recognise that some species other than
living humans have behaviour that should be called cultural. The
question arises, then, of how human (and, perhaps, ape) cultures are
different from those of other animals and just as importantly how they
became so different. Many of the socially learned behaviours in apes
do not seem likely to generate new patterns of behaviour except within
the same contingencies. Yet all human cultures are creative,
generating new patterns of behaviour from those learned from others.
This paper explores the possible role of stone tools in the emergence
of this creativity.
