Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
taken from all around the edge. Archaeologists for more than two cen-
turies may have been celebrating the earliest preserved form of human
waste: not
tools
, in short, but
trash
.
37
To return to the question of human recency: one interesting explana-
tion for the consistency of Acheulean tools over such vast stretches of
time and distance might be that
humans were not making them
. Richard
Klein at Stanford and Alan Walker and Pat Shipman at Penn State have
put forward this hypothesis—the idea being that who or whatever made
them was culturally and intellectually more like a creative chimp than a
modern human, hominids without the use of fully symbolic language, in
other words.
38
Such a theory would be consistent with what we (now think we) know
about tool use among chimpanzees and other primates: such creatures
are known to have invented new forms of tool use (potato washing or
fishing for ants with sticks), and may even have transferred such tools
from one group to another, but the capacity for innovation is clearly
limited.
39
Humans are unique in our ability to recombine tools for novel
uses, a faculty that may well spring from our possession of language—
our ability to think and act in terms of abstract symbols.
40
Incessant
innovativeness is not an obvious prerequisite for being human; that is
a modernist prejudice, if not a capitalist presumption. But the total
absence of innovativeness over vast spans of time could well be taken as
evidence of a rather feeble recombinant symbolic capacity (language),
regardless of whether artifacts of the type here under discussion were
spread by cultural diffusion or independent invention.
A diffusionist model, for example, could hold that hand-ax design (or
habit, or tradition) was passed around the world by (silent) imitation
from one individual (or group) to another, keeping constant only by
virtue of the (perceived) optimality (or sufficiency) of that particular
design for whatever function it did in fact perform. We might find little
variance (“drift”) in the particulars of hand-ax size or shape, simply
because the design was hard to improve on, and there was not yet the
ability to express a sense of creative play—in rocks, at least. The same
could be true, even if these so-called tools were repeatedly and inde-
pendently invented. Hand axes might have been independently invented,
and forgotten, thousands or even millions of times in different parts of
the world. Here again, tool-type designs could have remained stable, if
they served their makers well.
41
In neither case, however, is there neces-
