A recent study investigates hunters’ causal understandings of bow design and mechanics among the Hadza, one of the last remaining foraging populations.
The results suggest that sophisticated technology can evolve without complete causal understanding.
Human innovation depends not on our individual brainpower but on our collective brains, on networks of diverse minds sharing information, lucky insights and chance recombinations in cumulative fashion. This is certainly true now, and has been true for much of our evolutionary past.
The results presented in “The role of causal knowledge in the evolution of traditional technology” suggest that partial causal knowledge of bowyer mechanics is sufficient for the manufacture and transmission of highly adaptive bow technology among the Hadza. Bowyers are more likely to express beliefs consistent with experimentally verified mechanics when the variable of interest could be learned through experience using a bow. Nearly all participants possessed cause-and-effect knowledge about some mechanical tradeoffs, such as the effect of bow deflex on arrow speed, and they performed better than chance on the majority of Mechanical questions. Most participants lacked knowledge of some tradeoffs involved in designing a bow, such as bow profile and cross-sectional shape.
There were 13 questions about bow attributes. Hadza responses were compared to the “correct” responses as revealed by experimental and engineering research (blue dots)
It seems that hunter-gatherers, like the modern engineers, make and operate technologies that they themselves do not fully comprehend. Of course, both groups have partially correct causal models, but these are insufficient to account for the sophistication and effectiveness of their technology.
In fact, we humans get much of our causal understanding by studying the functioning technologies that cultural evolution assembles for us.
In this way, cultural evolution makes us smarter. Human innovation depends not on our individual brainpower but on our collective brains, on networks of diverse minds sharing information, lucky insights and chance recombinations in cumulative fashion.
This is certainly true now, and — as the recent study by suggests — has been true for much of our evolutionary past.
Surtil : 