Using mechanical tools improves our language skills, study finds
I am reminded of a passage from a paper on working memory constraints by Dwight Read, Professor of Anthropology at UCLA.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;147470490800600413" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.sagepub.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1177&#x2F;14747049080060...</a><p>&quot;Around 300,000 BP a major innovation in stone tool technology — the Levallois technique for flake removals — changed stone tool knapping from iterative flake removal to the repeated execution of an algorithm: “The characterization of the Levallois method given by Boëda (1995) clearly shows the sense in which this method becomes an algorithm for the production of flakes, rather than simply a particular method for the removal of a flake” (Read and van der Leeuw, 2008, p. 1963). The algorithm is used to prepare the surface of a flint nodule from which a flake will be removed. The removed flake is then shaped into the desired stone tool. Next, the surface of the nodule with the scar due to the flake removal is reworked so that the Levallois algorithm can be used again to remove another flake. This might be repeated for two or three flake removals.<p>The Levallois algorithm for flake production is not fully recursive since the stone surface that is the output of the algorithm (the stone surface with a scar due to the flake removal) must be modified before another flake can be removed using the Levallois algorithm. Around 50,000 BP, during the Upper Paleolithic, yet another technology — prismatic blade tool production — becomes widespread and is based on true recursion. For prismatic blade production, a stone nodule with a flat, striking platform is formed and then blades are recursively removed by striking the edge of the striking platform. The removal of one blade prepares the core for the removal of the next blade without any intermediate, preparatory steps (Read and van der Leeuw, 2008 and references therein); that is, the algorithm for blade removal has as its output a form on which the algorithm can be directly applied, and so on, until perhaps 100s of blades (as would be expected with true recursion) have been removed.iv<p>Blade technology flourished during the Upper Paleolithic and gave rise to a plethora of tools based on recursion (Hoffecker, 2007). Coolidge and Wynn (2004, 2005) have suggested that this florescence may relate to a genetic mutation expanding the capacity of the central executive component of working memory around 80,000 BP, between Stages vi and vii. Associated with this florescence is the appearance of new and more complex forms of social organization dependent upon culturally constructed kinship systems based on the recursive logic of genealogical tracing (Read 2001, Read in press a). By cultural, as opposed to biological, kin is meant kin determined through a culturally constructed system of kin relations expressed as a society specific kinship terminology (Parkin, 1997; Read, 2001, in press a). (A kinship terminology is a generative, conceptual system of kin terms through which the relation conditions that determine those who are one&#x27;s relatives [Read, 1984, 2001, in press] can be computed. Briefly, person B is kin to person A [and reciprocally, person A is kin to person B] when person A has a kin term that may be used [properly] to refer to person B, where the kin terms have been conceptually generated in a manner similar to an algebraic structure.) A kinship terminology is transmitted through enculturation with the consequence that a kinship terminology is composed of shared knowledge (Read, Lane, and van der Leeuw, in press). Cultural kinship is grounded in (though not determined by) reproduction as it is culturally understood (Scheffler and Lounsbury, 1971; Keesing, 1975), not by the facts of biological reproduction. The neurological changes that enabled recursion to become part of the cognitive repertoire of Homo thus had profound consequences reaching far beyond the implications it had for language production.&quot;