Published: April 15,
2015DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0121804
[The neurophysiological demands of stone toolmaking. “For the first
time, we’ve shown a relationship between the degree of prefrontal brain
activity - the ability to make technical judgements - and success in actually
making stone tools,” says Stout. Ed]
Abstract
Stone tools provide some
of the most abundant, continuous, and high resolution evidence of behavioral
change over human evolution, but their implications for cognitive evolution
have remained unclear. We investigated the neurophysiological demands of stone
toolmaking by training modern subjects in known Paleolithic methods (“Oldowan”,
“Acheulean”) and collecting structural and functional brain imaging data as
they made technical judgments (outcome prediction, strategic appropriateness)
about planned actions on partially completed tools. Results show that this task
affected neural activity and functional connectivity in dorsal prefrontal
cortex, that effect magnitude correlated with the frequency of correct
strategic judgments, and that the frequency of correct strategic judgments was
predictive of success in Acheulean, but not Oldowan, toolmaking. This
corroborates hypothesized cognitive control demands of Acheulean toolmaking,
specifically including information monitoring and manipulation functions
attributed to the "central executive" of working memory. More
broadly, it develops empirical methods for assessing the differential cognitive
demands of Paleolithic technologies, and expands the scope of evolutionary hypotheses
that can be tested using the available archaeological record.
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