Get the latest tech news
Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago
Each of us individually is the accumulated product of thousands of generations that have come before us in an unbroken line. Our culture and technology today are also the result of thousands of years of accumulated and remixed cultural knowledge.
To investigate when this technological turn may have begun and to explore the origin of cumulative culture, Paige and Perreault analyzed changes in the complexity of stone tool manufacturing techniques across the past 3.3 million years of the archaeological record. The results suggested that from around 3.3 to 1.8 million years ago — when australopiths and earliest Homo species were around — stone tool manufacturing sequences remained within the range of the baselines (1 to 6 PUs). Early hominins, 3.4 to 2 million years ago, likely relied on foraging strategies that require tools — like accessing meat, marrow and organs — leading to changes in brain size, lifespan and biology that set the stage for cumulative culture.
Or read this on Hacker News