Homo faber in the making: Towards an interdisciplinary understanding of human toolmaking skill acquisition Restricted; Files Only
Liu, Cheng (Spring 2025)
Abstract
Toolmaking, together with bipedalism and language, was once regarded as a defining feature that makes humans distinct from other species. Although this notion of human uniqueness has been challenged in the past decades by mounting evidence of toolmaking by non-human primates and corvids, it is undoubtedly still critical to human experience in the sense that a biocultural feedback loop is formed through toolmaking that shapes our minds and bodies. Yet the ability to make tools is not born with us, and we all need to either learn from others or through repeated trials and errors. To better understand the diversity and universality in the process of human toolmaking skill acquisition, my article-based dissertation combines multiple lines of analyses ranging from ethnography through experiment to archaeology.
The first chapter of my dissertation aims to provide a cross-cultural survey on how people in non-industrial societies learn to make tools. To achieve this goal, I compiled a 290-page-long appendix of relevant ethnographic records from 170 societies displaying varying subsistence strategies around the world and coded them using the eHRAF World Cultures database, with a particular focus on developmental contexts and transmission biases involved in the learning processes.
Subsequently, I narrowed down my research subject from the learning of general toolmaking to stone toolmaking, which represents the oldest and most widely distributed toolmaking tradition in human history due to the prevalence and durability of lithic materials. As such, Chapter 2 is a multi-sited experimental study focusing on the emergence of stone toolmaking variability at the intra- and inter-group levels, where I collaborated with five experienced knappers worldwide to recruit local adults without previous experience in knapping and train them to reproduce microlithic technology that was prevalent globally during the Late Pleistocene. The results showed that distinct communities of practice can be identified in constrained design space through multivariate analysis of core attributes. The analysis also demonstrated that intra-group variability was consistently lower than inter-group variability, suggesting that technological choices, rather than material constraints, drive morphological variation.
Parallelly, Chapter 3 presents new results from a multidisciplinary study of Late Acheulean handaxe-making skill acquisition involving thirty naïve participants trained for up to 90 hours in Late Acheulean style handaxe production and three expert knappers. I compare the experimental handaxe shapes to the Late Acheulean handaxe assemblage from Boxgrove, UK. Through the principal component analysis of morphometric data derived from images, this study suggested that knapping skill acquisition has a differential effect on the cultural reproduction of different aspects of handaxe morphology. More specifically, compared with elongation and pointedness (PC2), cross-sectional thinning (PC1) is more constrained by knapping skills. This finding thus sheds new light on how skill learning can bias the cultural reproduction of artifact morphology.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: A cross-cultural analysis of toolmaking skill acquisition in non-industrial societies
Chapter 2: Identifying divergent communities of practice in constrained design space: Experimental insights from the reproduction of microlithic technology
Chapter 3: Differential effects of knapping skill acquisition on the cultural reproduction of Late Acheulean handaxe morphology: Archaeological and experimental insights
Conclusion
About this Dissertation
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Primary PDF
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2027 | 2025-04-11 00:59:27 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2027 |
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File download under embargo until 22 May 2027 | 2025-04-01 14:24:41 -0400 | File download under embargo until 22 May 2027 |