There is serious debate among anthropologists about whether human culture is subject to evolutionary processes the way our biology is. There are compelling reasons that the answer is yes, but only if we recognize the significance of mind and material. By “mind” is meant our amazing ability to learn, thanks to the plasticity of our brains, the largest in the animal kingdom relative to body weight. By “material” is meant the tools we fashion, from the earliest stone flakes dated to over 3 million years to the myriad digital tools of today.
For a long time, we overlooked the role of tools in the story of our cultural evolution because we think of them merely as a by-product of the mind. But tools are both a product of our minds and a proxy for the development of our cognitive capacity. The things that mark us as humans like language, art, civilization, social norms and social organization all depend on our tools repertoire and evolve with it. The process is roughly circular: our minds make tools which then provide the material bedrock for all important aspects of our culture, and as our culture evolves in richness and complexity, so does our cognitive capacity to deal with it. For want of a better phrase, I call this process the “circle of cultural evolution.” It is marvelous thing.
Let’s put this circular theory in the timeline of our cultural evolution. Three million years ago, homonins (bipedal primates with relatively large brains) created stone tools that left permanent marks on the landscape they inhabited. Importantly, the tools they left behind signaled to others that they had been there, thus enabling them to mark their spatial landscapes. The same is true of fire. The ability to control fire confers more advantage than just cooked food; the real significance of fire is that it tells other hominins where you are and where they are. Like stone tools, fire introduces the capacity to observe a cultural landscape over huge distances.
Then, 40,000 years ago, an impressive leap in cognitive ability occurred when hominins started to leave stenciled palm prints on cave walls which progressed to often elaborate depictions of animals and humans in a group hunt or in the throes of a ritual.
As our species’ cognitive abilities increased with material developments, so did the size and complexity of our social groups. The past 10,000 years of our history provide a spectacular demonstration of this narrative. Over this short period, we underwent three major transitions – first, from hunter-gatherer communities to sedentary agrarian communities, second from small agrarian communities to compact settlements with sizes beyond one square kilometers in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, with communities of up to a million people. This second transition also depended on materials developed well before the transition, in the form of calendars, writing systems, and large monuments.
Finally, after a long hiatus came the third transition in the form of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, when large industrial cities, settlements larger than 100 square kilometers and supporting millions of people came into the scene. This too required a whole suite of new materials; this time, it was tools like clocks, steam engine, gas turbines, mechanized printing.
So, the story of us is a story of a circular feedback loop of how our clever minds produced tools that enabled new ways of doing things as well as new forms of organizing ourselves. The resultant increase in our cultural and social sophistication in turn challenged and expanded our cognitive abilities like what’s happening now in the ever inventive digital world we live in. Like a law of physics, this circular process is how we have advanced as a social species, and it is how we will continue to advance.
Further Reading
Atsushi Iriki, “Getting smart about learning: the ascendance of human intelligence”, Chapter 13 of Shuzen Sim and Benjamin Seet (editors), The Chronicles of Evolution, Wildtype Books, Singapore, 2019.