![]() Whether Oldowan stone tool making has implications for the evolution of human language and teaching (defined as active information donation 9) is debated 10, 11. This work supports a gradual evolution of language, with simple symbolic communication preceding behavioural modernity by hundreds of thousands of years. Our results support the hypothesis that hominin reliance on stone tool-making generated selection for teaching and language, and imply that (i) low-fidelity social transmission, such as imitation/emulation, may have contributed to the ~700,000 year stasis of the Oldowan technocomplex, and (ii) teaching or proto-language may have been pre-requisites for the appearance of Acheulean technology. ![]() ![]() Across six measures, transmission improves with teaching, and particularly with language, but not with imitation or emulation. ![]() Here we present an experiment investigating the efficacy of transmission of Oldowan tool-making skills along chains of adult human participants ( N=184) using five different transmission mechanisms. Hominin reliance on Oldowan stone tools-which appear from 2.5 mya and are believed to have been socially transmitted-has been hypothesized to have led to the evolution of teaching and language.
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