External Lecture | Dietrich Stout | The Evolution of Technology

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

Keynote Address | The Evolution of Culture and Technology Mini Symposium | Tel Aviv University

The simple fact of tool-making no longer provides a sharp dividing line between “Man the Tool-Maker” and the rest of the animal world. It is now clear that many other species make and use tools, and that distinctly human technology emerged through a long, multi-lineal, and meandering evolutionary process rather than the crossing of some critical threshold. However, it would be a mistake to underestimate the transformative effects of technology on everything from our hands and brains to our reproductive strategies and social organization. Understanding this complex and contingent evolutionary history will require simultaneous attention to particularistic details and more generalizable processes and relationships. In this lecture, I provide a critical review of evolutionary approaches to technology and, drawing on evidence from my own lab’s experimental neuroarchaeology studies of stone tool making, advance a “Perceptual Motor Hypothesis” proposing that human technological cognition has been evolutionarily and developmentally constructed from ancient primate perceptual-motor systems for body awareness and engagement with the world.