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Anthropology

Anthropologist Proposes That Toolmaking and Language Coevolved

Building a stone-age hammer is more complicated than it looks. First you have to gather the materials—stone inserts, handles, and binding material—which requires planning; then you have to assemble the pieces, which requires coordination. What distinguished near-modern humans from their predecessors 300,000 years ago, it is widely believed, was their ability to make and use complex tools, but experts disagree about how this dazzling leap in technology influenced human evolution.

Paleoanthropologist Stanley Ambrose has a new hypothesis about our evolutionary odyssey. Ambrose proposes that our ancestors' technology, hands, brains, and language coevolved. Complex toolmaking, which required fine motor skills, problemsolving and task planning, he argues, may have influenced the evolution of the frontal lobe, and coevolved with the gift of grammatical language 300,000 years ago.

Bimanual tool use was the first breakthrough, says Ambrose, a professor in the Department of Anthropology. The ability to steady an object with one hand while working the object with a tool held in the other, led to preferential handedness. Habitual toolmaking and use "may have led to lateralization of brain function and set the stage for the evolution of language," Ambrose says. The chimpanzee has poor bimanual coordination, no overall preference for right-handedness, weak precision grip, and limited wrist mobility and thumb strength—anatomical features critical for making and using complex tools.

Ambrose has traced early human's mastery of the "complex fine motor control nonrepetitive action sequences involved with making complex tools" to the precursor of Broca's area in the modern brain, which controls oro-facial fine motor control, and thus, language—which are also nonrepetitive action sequences. Broca's area is adjacent to and probably has a common developmental origin with the area that governs fine motor control in the hand.

Summer 2001