Cultural and instinctive knowledge

Tuesday 14 March 2023

“The main tool was a teardrop-shaped hand axe, and its symmetry and careful crafting jump out at us as something new under the sun, something made by minds like ours (see figure 9.2). This seems like a promising place to start talking about cumulative culture. But here’s the weird thing: Acheulean tools are nearly identical everywhere, from Africa to Europe to Asia, for more than a million years. There’s hardly any variation, which suggests that the knowledge of how to make these tools may not have been passed on culturally. Rather, the knowledge of how to make these tools may have become innate, just as the “knowledge” of how to build a dam is innate in beavers.”

Jonathan Haidt writes that, referencing:

“Richerson and Boyd 2005 makes this point. Cultural artifacts almost never show such stability across time and space. Think, for example, about swords and teapots, which fill museum cases because cultures are so inventive in the ways they create objects that fulfill the same basic functions.”

Richerson, P. J., and R. Boyd. 1998. “The Evolution of Human Ultra-Sociality.” In Indoctrinability, Ideology, and Warfare: Evolutionary Perspectives, ed. I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt and F. K. Salter, 71–95. New York: Berghahn.