At least in some areas of Americas, ancient textiles and patterns seem to be a methodology for transmitting ideas. Certainly some patterns have mathematical relationships. Would believe, in the absence of written text, passing on ideas in patterns recreated over generations, would be reasonable as a methodology.

Written scripts, when the translations to modern text has been lost, are so frustrating; they theoretically represent something, but the meanings have been lost. Dances or music ( such as the Amazon Snake Dance of the Caribs) transmit ideas or events, but again..its very subjective. For example in one case, it could represent a snake (red headed and unknown in Amazon); or be a way to transmit ideas, but the real meaning has been lost. One journal description suggests the snake to be more representative of a large red fire object with a long tail streaming behind it-a meteor, and depositing large amounts of water (gourd part of the dance)? Again subjective.

This might help:

Lew-Levy, Sheina, Rachel Reckin, Noa Lavi, jurgi Cristobal-Azkarte, and Kate Ellis-Davies 2017 How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills? A Meta-Ethnographic Review. Human Nature volume 28, pages367–394.

Thank you for your reply, Joan E Conover .

Edward Schortman ... I just downloaded and read the article you indicated. I found in this text very useful information for my research. Thanks a lot for your help!

It's my pleasure. All the best in your work!

Ed

Cultural transmission is a hot topic right now in human behavioral ecology as well as archaeology. However, many of these models of "transmission" fail to take into account the many observations by ethnographers that teaching is a very uncommon behavior among hunter-gatherers. At a "recent" Society for American Archaeology meeting symposium on cultural transmission, Alison Brooks presented here ethnographic perspectives about how Kalahari forager children learn and emphasized that in all of her decades of work with the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari, she had never seen anyone teach a child anything. Most of the archaeologists in the room ignored that important observation, as modeling is a more popular method right now; it's fast, less dirty and hard than fieldwork and learning a difficult language, and you rarely have to throw out your suppositions about the "importance" of your research question, as is often the case in real ethnographic fieldwork. I've seen archaeological modelers of cultural transmission occasionally admit that their models do not work without assumptions of very close and repeated mentoring of "learner's" outcomes in duplicating particular modeled technological elements, essentially mirroring apprenticeship dynamics of intense teaching of skills across a long period of time. Such hovering kinds of teaching are not reported for hunter-gatherers. I have worked with Savanna Pumé hunter-gatherers of the llanos of Venezuela for over 30 months of fieldwork (before Venezuela's political, economic, & security situation made visiting there impossible) dong behavior observation work. I have never seen anyone "teach" any descendant generation individual how to make or do something. Children learn by watching, copying on their own, and making lots of mistakes without visible instruction. For example, I have seen old grandmothers say "this is how you weave this kind of basket" when asked by an ethnographer, with fingers flying and no attempt to show how the process is done. Girls learn to weave by going to the trash dump, picking out discarded baskets, unweaving them, and then slowly trying to re-weave the item. That kind of learning is needed although these same girls spend countless hours sitting next to their mothers, aunts, sisters, grandmothers, and others as they weave an array of basketry containers, mats, string, etc. Similarly, when boys are making arrows, men or older boys will simply whip the item out of their hands if it looks as though they are making a hash of it. No attempt is made to explain or slowly demonstrate how it "should" be done. Kids appear to learn just through trial and error. Additionally, the archaeological idnea that it is important to make items well is also not necessarily warranted in many cases. One of the best older hunters among the Savanna Pumé (~55 yea old at the time) made really crappy arrows. I have seen other men (older & younger) laugh at the asymmetry in his heated, hammered, and filed metal arrowponts. The oldest man in camp grabbed this guys arrow with a lopsided hafted point the guy was working on (and only making worse), and filed the arrowhead into a symmetrical form while laughing and teasing him out his ugly workmanship. Additionally, especially in relation to arrows among many hunter-gatherers, most hunters have arrows made by lots of other people as part of their technological inventory. Good hunters are especially well tied in socially, and arrows are a very common trade item among not just among the Pumé but among many other hunter-gatherers. Many of the best arrow makers are not necessarily good hunters. Craft "specialization" is often the job of poor hunters or men too old to hunt who give them to other men and thus have some hand & claim in the eventual re-distibution of some of those hunted resources. Among the Savanna Pumé, I have only encountered one man who was both a good hunter and made beautiful arrows. Anthropologists may assume that cultural transmission is an important aspect of how technologies or ideas move into a descendant generation. However, without more long-term fieldwork among the world's disappearing foragers, there is no way to evaluate as scientists whether our initial research questions and assumptions are useful, and even if they are, what additional dimensions of the problem need to be considered to improve our knowledge. Modeling is the vogue now because we have fancy, fast computers. But no mental gymnastics can incorporate all the potentially relevant contingencies about a problem of interest to us. As the old saw goes: "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Thinking about what people do as anthropologists is very different from trying to learn from people whose entire lives depend on being able to find food and effectively use technologies. As anthropologists, even long-term fieldwork is only a small amount of time, representing just a fraction of the environmental & social variation that foragers have to contend with across the decades they may live. Without taking our best guess to the field, we risk wasting endless amounts of time (and taxpayer $$) on refining our alleged comprehension of these question in a purely deductive ways that may not necessarily be relevant to better understanding what it is we really do want to know. Fieldwork is the best way for anthropologists to follow the scientific method of trying to falsify what we believe may be our best approximation of useful knowledge. Otherwise, its just a juggling game of post-hoc accommodative arguments, good for generating new hypotheses but not testing those ideas. As I have quoted on RG before, I heard a great quote from an astrophysicist on the radio one time saying "If you're not wrong at least 50% of the time, you probably don't have any real ideas of any use." Modelers of "cultural transmission" should stop dismissing field anthropologists' frequent rebuttal that they never see the kinds of learning being incorporated into models during actual fieldwork. Get a good pair of boots, a hat, lots of netbooks, pens & pencils, then head out somewhere with no electricity to see how traditional folks manage not to wast their whole lives making tools so they can worry about really important stuff: like getting enough to eat, having sex, sleeping, and having some good laughs in this short tough life of hunting & gathering.

Rusty Greaves

First of all, thank you very much for this very enlightening comment. All the issues you highlight are absolutely crucial ... especially for us, prehistoric archaeologists, who sometimes tend to homogenizing hunter-gatherer societies to fit them into models that "seem to work well". It is truly a privilege o have your point of view in this discussion.

Thinking about prehistory, I would like to know your opinion on a specific issue.

In Franco-Cantabrian palaeolithic art, for example, there are certain stylistic and technical patterns in the process of manufacturing animal images that have remained relatively constant for many millennia. Likewise, there seems to be a maintenance/continuity of the technological processes (and possibly of the operative chains) involved in the realization of the aforementioned images.

Bearing in mind the impossibility of carrying out fieldwork with Paleolithic artists, do you think that the acquisition of the technical skill by prehistoric painters could happen in the same way that occurs in the case of the hunter-gatherer populations that you cite in your comment? That is ... the training and development of the painters could happen without the existence of real and specific teaching on how to make the images in relation to their technical aspects and the morphological characteristics that they should have in order to correctly code a given -and for us unknown- meaning?

Do you consider that in the case of rock art, this almost "self-taught" learning essentially based on observation would be sufficient to maintain the aforementioned stylistic and technical characteristics for such a long period of time?

Neemias, I am an archaeologist! My initial work with the Pumé was my ethnoarchaeological dissertation research, and then I have done other more ethnographically focused research there as well as ethnoarchaeological and ethnographic research in a Yucatec Maya community over the 17 years that my wife has studied for 27 years. I am Lew Winford's last student out of the University of New Mexico, at about the time he moved to Southern Methodist University. I still do ethnoarchaaology in the Maya context and through my museum research on Pumé collections that helps me get a perspective that is deeper than my short ethnographic lifetime. This helps me try to sneak up on an archaeological temporal scale by seeing something about technological changes going back to the earliest Pumé collections from 1881. Although Alexander von Humboldt did visited some of the River Pumé in 1801 on his voyage to the Orinoco River and the Rio Apure, he apparently made no collections of artifacts among them (or if he did, the loss of some of his collections at sea included those).

Of course, the truthful answer to your question in paragraphs 4-5 is "I don't know". I think the most sophisticated models we can work with are those of the desert Australian Aboriginal groups who use many of the same rock art sites into the modern era because of the tremendous geomorphic stability of this area. The same places that held water in the past (the most common location for rock art among desert Aboriginal groups is in ration to water holes) are still critical to recent uses of those areas and among groups who currently make "dinner camps" to forage and collect bush foods from their more sedentary modern camp locations. I don;t wanter to clutter RG with reduncdancies, and again would love to discuss this with you Neemias. Please see my answer of 10 September, 2018 to Alan Philip Garfinkel's question: "What is the role of ethnographic analogy in aiding researchers with the interpretation and analysis of aboriginal prehistoric rock art?" on 28 November, 2017 here on Research Gate. Also see my answer of 22 April 2016 to Alan Philip Garfinkle's question: "What is the meaning of animal depictions in hunter gatherer material culture including rock art?" on 8 April 2016 also here on RG.

Thank you Rusty Greaves. I have just read your answers on the questions you have indicated. They are quite enlightening.

hi, a poster on the subject has been added.

Cheers,

Lou

An article that, in my opinion, is quite relevant to this discussion:

d'Errico, F. and W. E. Banks (2015). "The archaeology of teaching: a conceptual framework." Cambridge Archaeological Journal 25(4): 859-866.

I would like to know your opinion about this conceptual framework.

Check Boyd, Richerson and Heinrich models on that..They have many books and papers for instance

The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation

Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, and Joseph Henrich

PNAS June 28, 2011 108 (Supplement 2) 10918-10925;

Vivian Scheinsohn ... Thank you very much for your recommendation. I have just downloaded some articles from these authors. I am sure they will be extremely useful!

You are wellcome. If you need further references I can facilitate them to you

You are wellcome. If you need further references I can facilitate them to you

thank you.

LS

Vivian Scheinsohn I will be very grateful that you can provide me with more references on the subject.

I have give a seminar on the subject some years ago. let me check if I have the program around here (at home in quarantine) and I will be back to you

Thank you Vivian Scheinsohn !!

Hi Neemias,

I think that you already know the research of Olivia Rivero.

In any case:

Article Master and apprentice: Evidence for learning in palaeolithic...

Best regards,

Thank you very much for your recommendation, Diego Garate . In fact, this article is one of the main references I have been using in my studies on the subject. The work developed by Olivia Rivero is excellent.

Polly Wiessner's ethnographic work with Kalahari San (Bushman) technology and its transmission through xaro exchange networks might just be of interest.

There's a small paragraph on technology on page 14032 in Wiessner, P.W., 2014. Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(39), pp.14027-14035.

and references to other potentially useful literature by Wiessner at the end.

You can try also here, perhaps you will find something that you consider useful for Your studies. It is about the colonisation of Scandinavia by post-Swiderian communities in Mesolithic. However, there is also some discussion about the transmission of technological knowledge between the generations of pioneers inside.

Sørensen M, Rankama T, KankaanpaÈaÈ J, Knutsson K, Knutsson H, Melvold S, Eriksen BV, Gløstad H. The first Eastern Migrations of People and Knowledge into Scandinavia: Evidence from Studies on Mesolithic Technology, 9th-8th Millennium BC. Norvegian Archaeol. Rev. 2013; 46(1): 19-56.

Rankama T, KankaanpaÈaÈ J. Eastern arrivals in post-glacial Lapland: the Sujala site 10000 cal BP., Antiquity. 2008; 82: 884-899.

Hi Neemias

I do not have at home my seminar program. And since in Argentina the quarantaine goes until april 12 I could not reach my office until then. But I will send you the program as soon as I can get it

In the meantime this book can help

https://ioa.ucla.edu/content/information-and-its-role-hunter-gatherer-bands

it discusses archaeological as well as ethnographical examples

Hi!

See also Peter Jordan 2015 "Technology as Human Social Tradition. Cultural Transmission among Hunter-Gatherers"

Hi, Neemias,

The studies of cultural transmission in Middle Palaeolithic contexts by G. B. Tostevin are very interesting. Furthermore, in his book “Seeing lithics: a middle range theory...” there is available a very clarifying theoretical and practice introduction that may help.

Please also consider this:

Tim Ryan Maloney (2019) Towards Quantifying Teaching and Learning

in Prehistory Using Stone Artifact Reduction Sequences, Lithic Technology, 44:1, 36-51, DOI:10.1080/01977261.2018.1564855

Hello!

I want to thank everyone who has been collaborating in this discussion.... David M. Witelson Grzegorz Osipowicz Vivian Scheinsohn Jan Ingolf Kleppe Alejandro Mayor Tim Maloney

I really appreciate all of your comments and recommendations... and I believe that we can gather very useful information here for everyone who, like me, is interested in this topic.

Another important reference for our discussion:

Hideaki, T. and B. S. Hewlett (2016). Social learning and innovation in contemporary hunter-gatherers: Evolutionary and ethnographic perspectives. Japan, Springer.

There is a volume in French and English about teaching in prehistory that might be useful:

Klaric, L. (Ed.) 2018. L'apprenti préhistorique. Appréhender l'apprentissage, les savoir-faire et l'expertise à travers les productions techniques des sociétés préhistoriques / The prehistoric apprentice. Investigating apprenticeship, know-how and expertise in prehistoric technologies.

http://www.librairie-archeologique.com/index.html?produit=51230

Although I have not specifically addressed technology topics, but mathematical knowledge among hunter-gatherers, some topics can be found in my contributions at Researchgate.

Hi Neemias I have recovered my seminar program. Please give me an email addres to send it back to you

What good news Vivian Scheinsohn ! Thank you!

My email is [email protected] or [email protected]

Hi Neemias, thank you for this question. I absolutely agree with the comment from Rusty Greaves that learning among traditional societies can be very different from the kind of learning process that we are familiar of today. In the cultural transmission literature, information is thought to 'transmit' from an individual to another. While this makes sense metaphorically, it is hard to find learning mechanisms among living traditional societies that are analogous to this transmission process. This point was discussed by Simon Holdaway and Harry Allen in their 2012 book chapter "Placing ideas in the land: practical and ritual training among the Australian Aborigines" (In the book "Archaeology and apprenticeship: Body knowledge: identity and communities of practice"). They noted that knowledge is learned through being in the landscape and actively situating knowledge (in the form of mythical stories) in practical experience. The point here is beyond the simple emphasis on practice in learning, but rather raising the question of what is being learned or transmitted, and how do we grapple with ideas of information fidelity and cumulative culture when cultural knowledge can in fact be malleable, negotiable and contextual. Tim Ingold made a similar point with an example of him learning to play cello in his 2004 paper "Beyond biology and culture. The meaning of evolution in a relational world" in Social Anthropology 12(2) 209-221.

There is an immediacy to seeing children’s items (often glossed as toys) as the material evidence of this process. Maybe this isn’t what you were thinking of, but have a look at

Is it ritual? Or is it children?: Distinguishing consequences of play from ritual actions in the prehistoric archaeological record2018Current Anthropology59(5):616-643Langley MC, Litster M

things such as axes, basket stones and the like are practical items to be suited to hand size, so where available they are material examples.

This and Tim’s paper are also good entry points to ethno-archaeological studies in Australia.

Sam Lin makes an excellent set of points about learning in traditional societies, particular in regard to hunter-gatherers where accurate scientific knowledge about environments and their common and unusual variations are critical to the success of this economic form of human adaptations. The importance of experiential learning cannot be overstated in the current intellectual debates about how transmission is accomplished. I wish to comment on the use of the term "mythical stories". In my opinion and experience, the continued use of the term "myth" is generally a under appreciation of the empirical scientific knowledge of traditional populations. Elsewhere on RG I have recounted scientifically accurate "stories" about natural events that are couched in metaphors in traditional languages, and may sound quaint or uninformed in translation to fieldworkers who have not learned the language of a particular population (referenced in my 1 March answer here). I have had many such experience in my work with the Pume of Venezuela, where I would ask informants about some of their behaviors, and had to wait up to 1.5 years for them to provide a detailed answer beyond "because" (as I've mentioned on RG before, this is the automatic response to a child's kind of question of ignorance, even by young adult anthropologist or greyhead). I want to recount an interesting Australian example, from the problematic divulgences of Richard Gould in his book 1969 book Yiwara: Foragers of the Australian Desert. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Gould offended some (many?) Ptjantjara, Ngatajara, and other Aboriginal peoples for including photographs of sacred elements in a waterhole, and possibly some of his descriptions of the events surrounding a teaching went at this location. I wish to recount what I feel is the important learning event that was described, and discuss the use of the term "sacred" by traditional populations that includes practical environmental knowledge. I have spoken extensively with Dick Gould about this event, He identified the visit to the Pukura waterhole (pp. 120-128, as an example of the importance of experiential environmental learning and he agrees that what he described in Yiwara as a set of "ritual" activities is really just science as we conceive of it, although it includes a level of cultural importance that can be approximated by some of our anthropological and popular terms implying r"religious" significance, but is not mythological. Gould begins this discussion referencing Norman Tindale's point that alleged "myths" about landscape features and initiations were practical teaching. When they arrived at the waterhole, Gould describes the men clearing off the vegetation grown around it, adding mud from within the waterhole all around its banks, and then coat it with red ochre. As they removed mud from the bottom of the waterhole that , they also retrieved 47 stones and sticks from within the waterhole. These objects were discussed in detail, they had individual stories. These objects were then replaced at the bottom f the waterhole. What was accomplished at Pukura was to stabilize the margins of this waterhole and dredge sediments that had accumulated in it to re-establish its maximum capacity. The 47 objects retrieved were markers of the maximum base of the pool. The activities associated with this event are not "myth', they were mnemonics about what needed to be done to accomplish environmental stewardship of a critical resource. The stories, dances, songs, costumes, etc. associated with not only Australian Aboriginal practices such as this but in many societies are "sacred" in a sense that maintaining a healthy, functioning environment for hunting & gathering is a critically important cultural practice. I believe that many traditional people identify a number of practices as sacred or part of their "religious" life because they understand that (at least now in what we hope is a more tolerant social milieu that does no denigrate practices outside of the more common Abrahamic, Buddhist, Shinto, and other religions of larger populations) these are afforded a certain level of protection, whereas their own views on environmental stewardship have been run roughshod by outsiders for centuries. Only relatively recently have forest managers in Australia recognized that Aboriginal practices of fire management prevent larger, destructive fires. Recent research by Bliege-Bird, Bird, and Codding have demonstrated that smaller fires also create more productive post-fire mosaic environments with more diverse resources (as following recovery, smaller fires create a patchwork of different recovery flora & fauna compared with more monolithic and less diverse succession in the wake of more extensive fires. Traditional peoples are very wise to identify the terms outsiders might respect as the vessel for much of their profound, empirically-based scientific knowledge. Like their kinship systems, Australian Desert peoples have an amazingly diverse set of complex practices that perpetuate the details of environmental variation, distribute that knowledge among a dispersed and interacting set of "different" language population groups, and have developed to make life possible for tens of thousands of years in an extremely challenging kind of environment. Many so-called "initiation rituals" are a forms of making certain that a diversity of environmental knowledge is maintained in a cultural system; another way that humans are able to feed on high value foods and use hunting & gathering as a viable and economic practice even into the 21st century. Learning in traditional societies is infinitely more complex than our modeling expectations about simplistic transmission of information about how to make particular tools or maintain "cultural norms". They actual practices are situationally responsive, constantly updating new information, may cover vast areas depending of the kinds of geography we look at (and that diversity can only be minimally sampled even in long-term ethnographic fieldwork), and have a much greater temporal record of utility than the "schooling" or "apprentice" perspectives that dominate our current modeling approaches to transmission of cultural knowledge. To use a popular culture analogy, the calculus-like complexity of these systems make Mr. Spock's 3-D chess (and many of our modeling assumptions) look like tiddlywinks. Science is astonishing when we confront our own ignorance about how the world works. We must encourage our students to go to the field and explore what is still practiced that can help us better understand the real-life concerns of foragers about managing economic options that are critical to such successful life ways, and will help us more informatively develop models to address what is challenging in archaeological research of past human activities and cultural maintenance of their profound scientific knowledge.

I reviewed some relevant literature here:

Article Is Language Necessary for the Social Transmission of Lithic ...

Plenty of fascinating articles on the subject!

A relevant paper to this discussion:

MacDonald, K. (2007). Cross-cultural comparison of learning in human hunting. Human Nature, 18(4), 386-402.

Thank you for your valuable contributions Natasha Reynolds , Manoel Campos Almeida , Sam Lin , Colin Pardoe , Dor Shilton and Larissa Straffon

Dear Neemias maybe these books will be useful for the topic:

Lavi, N. and Friesem, D.E. 2019.Towards a Broader View of Hunter-Gatherer Sharing.;

Jordan, P. 2015. Technology as human social tradition: cultural transmission among hunter-gatherers

For essential context regarding the subtlies and significance of agent-material interaction, see the writings of Tim Ingold and Lambros Malafouris:

Ihde, Don; Malafouris, Lambros

• 2017 "Homo faber revisited: postphenomenology and material engagement theory," in Philosophy and Technology (Springer), vol. 5832 no. 2, pp. 195-214 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13347-018-0321-7, uploaded: 30 July 2018, accessed: 21 November 2019).

Ingold, Tim

• 2011a Being alive; essays on movement, knowledge and description, London/New York, Routledge.
• 2011b The perception of the environment; essays on livelihood, dwelling, and skill, 2nd ed., London/New York, Routledge.
• 2012 "Toward an ecology of materials," in Annual Review of Anthropology (Annual Reviews), vol. 41, pp. 427-442 (http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920, accessed: 1 May 2016).

Malafouris, Lambros

• 2007 "Before and beyond representation: towards an enactive conception of the Paleolithic image," in Image and imagination: a global prehistory of figurative representation, Collin Renfrew and Iain Morley, editors, Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, pp. 289-302 (http://cogprints.org/6134/, accessed: 30 January 2015).
• 2008 "Between brains, bodies, and things: tectonoetic awareness and the extended self," in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (The Royal Society), vol. 363, no. 1499, pp. 1993-2002 (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2008.0014, uploaded: 21 February 2008, accessed: 8 April 2020).
• 2013a How things shape the mind, a theory of material engagement, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press.
• 2013b How things shape the mind, a theory of material engagement, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press (https://direct-mit-edu.e-revistas.ugto.mx/books/book/2994/How-Things-Shape-the-MindA-Theory-of-Material, accessed: 1 May 2020).
• 2013c Chapter 3, "The material-engagement approach: a summary of the argument," in How things shape the mind, a theory of material engagement, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press (https://www.academia.edu/32103798, accessed: 8 April 2020).
• 2015 "Metaplasticity and the primacy of material engagement," in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture (Taylor and Francis), vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 351-371 (https://www.academia.edu/32103497, accessed: 8 April 2020).
• 2016 "On human becoming and incompleteness: a material engagement approach to the study of embodiment in evolution and culture," in Embodiment in evolution and culture, Gregor Etzelmüller and Christian Tewes, editors, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, pp. 289-305 (https://www.academia.edu/32103749, accessed: 8 April 2020).
• 2019a "Mind and material engagement," in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (Springer), vol. 18, pp. 1-17 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-018-9606-7, uploaded: 1 December 2018, accessed: 8 April 2020).
• 2019b "Thinking as 'thinging': psychology with things," in Current Directions in Psychological Science (Association for Psychological Science/Sage), vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 3-8 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721419873349, uploaded: 24 September 2019, accessed: 17 April 2020).

Thank you !

Thank you very much for your contribution Masha Krakovsky and David Charles Wright-Carr

Recently another article by Malafouris appeared:

Malafouris, Lambros

2020 "How does thinking relate to tool making?," in Adaptive Behavior (Sage Publications) (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1059712320950539, uploaded: 1 September 2020, accessed: 19 October 2020).

Thank you David Charles Wright-Carr

Hola, recomiendo este trabajo, saludos! Borrero, Luis A. 2011 La arqueología de cazadores-recolectores: ambiente y conocimiento. Cazadores-Recolectores del Cono Sur 4:43–58.

Hi there,

These are all great suggestions. I would like to add much of the work conducted by Blandine Bril and Valentine Roux to this discussion. While some of the examples used are from artisanal contexts and therefore not necessarily and easily adaptable to Hunter-Gatherer systems of knowledge transmission, I find the theoretical positioning and methodological consequences quite useful, especially when one considers the material implications of practice. In short, I find these works quite practical and complementary to those that are more clearly situated within current "cultural transmission theory". Much of the work has been conducted in French, but both authors are quite prolific in the English literature as well. A good introduction to some of the ideas can be found in the following English language chapter:

BRIL B. (2015) ‒ Learning to Use Tools: A Functional Approach to Action, in L. Filliettaz et S. Billett dir, Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work, New York, Springer International Publishing, p. 95‑118.

Happy reading,

Best,

L

Painting and mobiliary objects are vehicles of transmission containing symbolic references. But tools represent symbolic referencing as well.

Thank you for your recomendations María Clara Álvarez , Lars Anderson and Stanley.

Hi Neemias,

my colleagues and I experimentally investigated the cognitive context of technological knowledge (but not in hunter-gatherers)

Chapter Palaeolithic toolmaking and the evolution of cognition and language

Preprint Cognitive performance and specific aspects of language proce...

You might also want to check:

Article Transmission of Tool-making through Verbal and Non-verbal Co...

Article The Role of Verbal Interaction During Experimental Bifacial ...

Article Experimental Evidence for the Co-Evolution of Hominin Tool-M...

Article Speech, stone tool-making and the evolution of language

Article Teaching to make stone tools: New experimental evidence supp...

I’d like to suggest looking at the historical records of the earliest prehistoric village crafts people who later, around the middle ages who form the early apprenticeship guilds. These, along with our schools, libraries, and on-line videos continue to transmit and share technology from the pervious generations of hunter gathers to the new generation version of our hunter gathers.

Our illustrations, via cave paintings, are very early record of sharing life skills. Skills that were manual, hands-on interactions with the natural world. Our early technology to feed cloth and sustain our families and communities.

In early times we showed these skills to our children via a watch me and and “do what I did” style of teaching. Later we augmented that with stone tablets and words. Later made schools to more widely share the skills. And later, with our teenagers and adults formed hunting, agriculture, clothing and building groups. These later came to include formal skills in community craftsman. Eventually formalized into apprenticeship guilds. Todays apprenticeship include the “watch me and do what I did” style of transmitting technical and life sustaining knowledge.

Our early story telling, theater performances, competitions, village festivals and holiday celebrations are also a way we transmitted skills from distant communities. Like today, some times it wasn’t seeing or hearing a “known” technology as much as the idea & belief it was possible. That, an imagined technology later, via a transmission of ideas led to transmission of new technology.

I would like to recommend the following paper: Roberts, Patrick and Brian A. Stewart 2018. “Defining the ‘generalist specialist’ niche for Pleistocene

Homo sapiens.” Nature Human Behaviour 2: 542-550. I have also attached two pages from my 2021 monograph that discusses their research.

Thank you very much. I'll watch carefully. Happy celebrations !

Thank you all for your contributions!

Greetings Neemias

All animals are hunters and gatherers so from a Biological point, the simplest single celled animal is going to use at least one of it’s 5 senses to explore and thrive in its world. As you go up the multi-celled food chain you can observe animals that learn by making enough mistakes that it eventually kills them or they succeed. If it succeeds and is able to reproduce, its offspring can learn by making the same mistakes, observe from its parents’ examples or be shown by the parent directly. So, the transfer of knowledge can be a direct transfer to the offspring or tribe or an observed transfer. Young children tend to want to emulate their older siblings, their parent or someone that is revered within the tribe.

If you have been banished from the tribe and are forced to relocated to unfamiliar lands, then you experiment until it kills you. The Vietnam community in the SF bay area were picking and consuming a mushroom that looked just like an edible variety from Vietnam. Unfortunately, many people died.

You could observe from other animals example and hope the berries that birds eat are the same berry that humans can consume or seek out others from another tribe and hope they will share their knowledge.

You can always steal the knowledge. The Japanese would raid China and Korea and kidnap their artists and take them back to Japanese and force them to share their skills. In Europe, your tribe could invade another country, rape and pillage, but you never killed the blacksmith. He was the keeper of the local community’s technological knowledge. If he had nothing new to pass one, then you could kill him, but in most cases he would be brought back and allowed to set up a shop and add to the invader’s community.

What is the motivation to pass on knowledge? If you are the only one in the tribe that knows the location of a resource, do you share that knowledge for the betterment of the tribe or control the asset to elevate your position within your tribe?

As you can see there is no simple example as to how or why knowledge is passed on to your neighbor or another generation. People are people no matter when or where they live. We are all motivated for different reasons in all our actions.

You should look to children on how they learn. How do parents teach their children? How do University scholars pass on their knowledge and why?

William Roan

heI find this article extremely interesting (you probably already know it) from a cultural anthropological point of view; is a specific investigation into the '' causal knowledge '' of Hadza hunters on the specific technology of the bow and arrows:

Harris, J. A., Boyd, R., & Wood, B. M. (2021). The role of causal knowledge in the evolution of traditional technology. Current Biology, 31 (8), 1798-1803.