From the Vault; Stone Age Technology with Dietrich Stout

Paleolithic tools inform not just our understanding of prehistoric lives, but also the evolution and nature of the human mind. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe chat with Emory University’s Associate Professor of Anthropology Dr. Dietrich Stout about the hand ax, tool use and even "2001: A Space Odyssey.” (Originally published Nov. 13, 2018)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to venture into the Vault for a classic episode
of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This one originally aired
November two thousand eighteen. This was our interview with the
emery professor Dietrich Stout about stone age technology. Yeah, this one,
this one was a lot of fun. We actually had

(00:26):
an in the studio, so uh, no phone call, uh
static or anything going on with this one. Uh. He
was a tremendously interesting to chat with and he even
engage some discussion on two thousand and one a Space Odyssey,
which of course was the the Vault episode that we
aired before this one. Yeah, so we hope you enjoy

(00:47):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Ra and I'm Joe McCormick.
In today we have for you an interview episode, an
episode where we sat down and talked to an expert

(01:09):
on paleolithic technology. And I'm really excited for you all
to hear this one because this conversation was a lot
of fun. A Stone Age technology is so much more
fascinating than you would think, yeah, because in looking at it,
we're looking really at the roots of a human invention
and innovation, Like where does the entire tree of human
technology spring from? Yeah, and how did ancient technology shape us?

(01:34):
So this is going to be a conversation with Dr
Dietrich Stout. Dietrich Stout is an Associate professor of anthropology
at Emory University, where his Paleolithic Technology Laboratory investigates the
role of technology and human evolution. Dr Stout is also
Associate director of Emory's cross Disciplinary Center for Mind, Brain
and Culture, which promotes diverse and integrative research into human

(01:57):
nature and experience. His research focus on Paleolithic stone toolmaking
and brain evolution, integrads field research at early Stone Age
archaeological sites in Ethiopia with laboratory and museum research including
artifact analysis and experimental replication, functional and structural neuroimaging, behavioral analysis,
and psychometric testing. Now, if you want to check out

(02:20):
those centers I mentioned, the Paleolithic Technology Laboratory, you can
find that at scholar blogs dot Emery dot e d
u slash Stout Lab, and then the Center for mind
braining culture. You can just go to c MBC dot
Emery dot E d U. Yeah, this is a super
fun interview. I should distress this was an in studio interview. Yeah,

(02:42):
one of a couple of interviews we recorded about a
month ago where we said, hey, let's let's reach out
to some local experts on some various topics. We don't
necessarily we enjoyed jumping on the phone with with folks,
but why not have some some local talent come into
the studio. And that's what we did here. It was
a lot of fun, uh, and I and you will
really enjoy it. So I'd say, without any further ado,

(03:03):
let's go straight to our conversation with Dietrich Stout. Hey, Dietrich,
thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
Can you start by telling our listeners a little bit
about who you are and what you do? Yeah. Well,
I'm an associate professor of anthropology at Emory University. I'm

(03:23):
also the associate director of the Center for Mind, Brain
and Culture at Emery as well, which is a center
that promotes interdisciplinary research on mind, brain and culture. And
those are basically my interests. I come at it from
the direction of archaeology and the hope that we can
learn something from the past about what made us the

(03:45):
way we are today. So how did you first get
interested in stone age technology? Well, um, it's not something
that you typically encounter in most high schools around the country. UH. So,
you know, when I went to UH to college, I
really had had no idea of the possibilities that were
there for anthropology, for the archaeology of human origins. I

(04:05):
did know that I was interested in the way the
human mind works, in the nature of human experience. UH.
And at the time, I thought that meant that I
wanted to be a philosopher. When I got to school,
I realized what I said before, that a lot of
the way we can understand how we are today and
the nature of human experiences to understand the evolutionary processes

(04:27):
that brought us to where we are. UH. And I
had a really great UH professor as a freshman and
a freshman seminar. He told me to take some archaeology classes.
I did, and I still I just remember one lecture
that my professor gave, and she was talking about these
ancient stone tools in a particular kind called the little
vow waw technique, um, And he was pointing out that

(04:49):
you could see every individual action and and blow against
the core that this person had done something like fifty
or a hundred thousand years ago, and you could reconstruct
what they were thinking, the plans they made, And that
just struck me as as an incredible window on the
past and how our minds became the way that they
are today. And that's what got me started on it.
And like seeing into a dead person's imagination. Yeah, to

(05:11):
be able to recapture that, I mean, And now I've
worked at sites there are half a million years old
where you can literally trace individual decision making processes. It's
it's it's pretty incredible. Actually held a core at one
of these sites. I was looking at it and I
was wondering why they didn't do something that that I
would have done with that core, that piece of rock,
and I twisted it around to look at where I

(05:32):
was thinking about, and I said that they actually had tried,
well I was thinking, but it didn't work. So both
of us made the same mistake, separated by half a
million years. That's almost a little spooky. Yeah. Um, So
obviously we know that the Stone Age means stone tools.
But what as an expert in the area, what does
the Stone Age mean to you? What do you think

(05:54):
about when when this age is conjured? Uh? Yeah, well,
I think really of the the time period uh for
which we have evidence of human behavior in the forms
of archaeology, but extending way back into the past, so
that we have information, but it's also an evolutionary time depth.
And we're talking millions of years, more than three million

(06:16):
years at this point of time. Uh. So that's what
gets me excited about the Stone Age. Uh And of
course you know, it's called the Stone Age for a reason.
Most of what we have are the best evidences of
stone tools for behavior. Um So that's what I've focused on.
And when you think about the very beginning of the Paleolithic,
obviously we're talking about hominid ancestors then, but not not

(06:40):
Homo sapiens, right, And so when those organisms were alive,
when when they were trying to survive and and stone
tools began to play a role in their lives, what
was that role? What was the earliest role you think
stone tools played in in these organisms survival? Yeah? Well,
I would say at the outset, there's a lot of

(07:02):
things we don't really know with any great certainty about
the earliest Paleolithic uh. I think that there is strong
evidence that some of the earlier tools were used for
for butchery of animals, because you can recover actual cut
marks on bones when somebody accidentally nicked the bone as

(07:22):
they were butchering an animal, and so that's a direct evidence.
Now what else they were used for is much harder
to say because the plant materials, all those things are gone,
so there's very limited evidence of that, and it's only
in the past couple of years that that has been
reported a much earlier site. We used to think the
earliest stone tools were two and a half million years

(07:42):
old that worked at some of those sites, but now
they go back to three point three million years and
we as yet have very little evidence of what they
might have done with those tools. Hopefully in the next
few years there will be the kinds of evidence that
I was talking about, but it's just not there yet,
so a lot of unknowns. If I had to say,
these things are cutting tools, and the most important thing

(08:04):
probably for early humans to be able to cut was
animal flesh to access that, but they could have used
them for a lot of other things, including making other tools. Uh.
One of the great things about having a cutting edge
is your ability to shape other tools. For instance, in
would if you have a knife in the form of
a stone flake, you can make a spear. You can

(08:25):
make a digging stick. Again, though the wood's not there anymore.
So if they did that, we have a hard time
knowing for sure. And when you mentioned those dates a
minute ago that's referring to, Uh, is that that modified
stone tools we're not talking about like found stone tools. No,
And in fact, it would be nearly impossible to identify
and differentiate a found stone tool from a rock at

(08:49):
this point. M. So that's why we know chimpanzees use
rocks as tools, and so it's you know, likely that
are very early ancestors did Um. But yeah, by by
three point three, we have evidence of them actually fracturing
rock on purpose in a controlled way to produce cutting edges.
And that's something that we can definitively separate from a

(09:11):
natural process, so we know it it occurred at that point. Um.
Currently if I'm wrong, but are there are there broad
stroke um classifications for the different levels of tool creation?
Like I want to say, it's something like nature fact, artifact, etcetera. Uh,
could you walk our listeners through that? Yeah? Well, um,
you know, of course you could have on modified rocks

(09:35):
used as tools, for instance, to crack open and nut
as Uh. Chimpanzees and some monkeys, macaque monkeys do that
as well. Um, that's a tool, you know, it's a
stone tool. Um. But what we see by three point
three million years is the actual modification of the rock
on purpose in order to make a different kind of tool. Uh.

(09:56):
And that's generally a process simply of fracturing the to
produce sharp shards or flakes of stone that then become knives. Um.
And so that's loosely called like mode one. Uh. The
most well known industry that does that is the old
One named after Old of I Gorge or Mary and

(10:17):
Louis Leaky worked. Uh. And that's a very simple form
of stone tool making. Uh. It does require quite a
bit of coordination. It's not easy to break rocks. Um.
They're hard. You have to hit them just right and
with a lot of force. Um. But it's pretty conceptually simple.
You're not gonna make flakes um. And then after that
you've got what variously is called like mode to or

(10:40):
loosely called Schulian after a site where it was first
described in Europe. Is the manufacture of these things that
archaeologists call hand axes. And that's where you're not just
shattering the rock into flakes, but you're actually shaping the
rock to make a tool. UM. The classic tool from
this sort of stage or time period is UH the
hand as, which would be a flat rock UM with

(11:05):
cutting edge most of the way around the perimeter and
a tip at one end can be good again we
think for a large animal butchery UH. And so that's
where you've moved in to actually having the intention, having
a goal in mind, and the techniques that you have.
The control over the stone that's required is more um UH.
Following that, you have what we call prepared core technologies

(11:26):
in which you shape the rock in a careful way
so that you can remove one final piece that's already
pre shaped the way you want it to be uh.
And then you can do that over and over again,
so it becomes a very efficient way of making tools.
And then there's all sorts of variations on that UM.
And that's the point in which we think there's a
big change that they start actually putting these things on sticks,

(11:47):
for instance hafting. Right, So you have composite tools, and
you have all sorts of other techniques and materials that
then enter the process and things become much more complex.
So you mentioned the hand as, I'm interested to know
a little bit more about that. I may be mistaken,
but there there have been identified, I think, different schools
of hand as construction. Is that right? Well, yeah, I

(12:10):
mean there are different ways of making something that we
call a hand ax. Uh. Now, we also, I would
have be very careful about that. We should always remember
that when we call slanging a hand axt, that's a
name that we came up with to describe a bunch
of things that we think are all similar to each other.
That doesn't necessarily map onto what anybody was thinking in
the past, or whether they knew each other or or whatever.

(12:33):
So it's a tool, but we have to be careful
about it. You put a name on something, you think
you understand it. Uh. But yeah, So, as I mentioned,
the hand ax has a particular form, there's a lot
of different ways you could achieve that, and a lot
of different starting points. For instance, I might start with
just a big rock and then shape that rock into
a pointed, thin hand ax. Uh Or I could start

(12:56):
with an even larger rock and then I knock off
a giant flame a you know, more than more than
ten centimeters long, as generally they cut off, and that's
almost already what I need. You know, it's got a
big cutting edge all the way around the edge. And
then I shape that flight just a little bit right.
And that's a very different way of making a tool
that in the end probably as a similar function and

(13:17):
looks quite similar. And then there's all sorts of different
sub variants of ways of doing that. Uh So that's
what I think when you're talking about different schools, is
these different methods of making the hand access. Now there's
as a raging debate over what the variation actually means,
you know, they the sort of naive ascension early on
was every time you find a different way of doing something,

(13:38):
that's a different quote culture, even though we don't really
know what we mean by that term at that point.
Now now there's you know, people saying that all these
are just recurring rediscoveries of simple solutions to the same
kind of problems. They don't necessarily imply any sort of
cultural continuity or contact between people. There's even been suggestions
that there was some kind of large genetic opponent to

(14:00):
the way that people made these these hand axes. So
now it's up for debate. But the variation is what
we we study to try to understand what was going
on in the past. That's where we have a sort
of an insight into what was what was happening. Well,
I was definitely going to ask you the naive question
about whether that's a result of culture, but is there
So if we don't make that assumption that the different

(14:21):
forms or shapes or approaches to hand axes are necessarily
the result of cultural traditions or cultural contact, is there
anything that you think looking at tools like this Stone
age tools could possibly tell us about the culture of
the creatures that made them. Yeah, well, and so this
is where we have to get into the sort of

(14:42):
stuff that you can learn through experimental archaeology. Um, for instance,
how difficult is it to discover and use particular techniques?
You know, so you know, if there if there's two
people that do something the same way, if it's an
obvious answer, then the no reason to think they learned
it from each other. But if it's this really sort

(15:02):
of obscure and and and hard to learn technique that
they share, and then it's much more likely that they
learned it from each other. So I mean, so there's
this thing in in the issuely and uh sort of
a geographic patterning um to where you have far fewer
hand axes in East Asia than you do in Africa

(15:26):
and Western Asia and Europe. And also none of them
really to appear to be as refined as some of
the nicest examples from from further west. Um. And so
people have devided for a long time with this geographical
patterning means, and I tend to interpret it, you know,
is in terms of there are some techniques that are

(15:48):
pretty hard to discover on your own and some that
are easy, you know. And so you have a lot
of reinvention of sort of easy hand acts making here
there in the other place, you know. But these particular uh,
advanced techniques may only have been invited it once or
twice or a couple of times, and so their geographic
spread is more restricted. So that's sort of the way
that you make a relationship between understanding the way that

(16:09):
you actually make the tools and then how they might
spread through ancient populations. So you mentioned experimental archaeology. Um.
I know a lot of people probably when they think
about the data collection part of archaeology, they probably think
primarily about digging. Um. But but tell us a little
bit about what experimental archaeology means and what what what

(16:31):
kind of things that has helped us understand that we
couldn't understand just from looking at actual artifacts. Yeah. Well,
you know what you can understand from just looking at
the artifact is actually a bit limited. You know, these
things they don't they don't come out of the ground
with with labels on them. Uh uh. You know. I
I like to do this when I give a presentation
and to show a picture full of a table full

(16:53):
of a bunch of old one stone tools and say like, okay,
now what does this tell us? And in most people,
you know, you can't even tell all that there are
anything other than just rocks if you're not used to
looking at them. So what you have to do to
understand what these tools that we dig up can actually
tell us is uh, basically experimental archaeology. We use analogies,
We try to learn how to make them ourselves, and

(17:15):
then you can manipulate. Well, if I make it this way,
then it looks like that. If I make it this way,
it looks like that. If I use it this way,
this happens to it. Um. So then we make these analogies,
these sort of inferential arguments that processes we can observe
and manipulate experimentally now are the same ones that produce
the same effects in the past. Uh, I mean, if

(17:36):
you think about it, we do this you know any time,
even in more recent time periods. When you look at
an artifact, I mean, you're making an analogy with something
you're familiar with. Usually even it's just implicit, you know, obviously, um,
this is a sword, you know, seeing things like that
before and now you don't really know that you're right,
but it's similar enough to things with which you're familiar
that that that's you know, that's reasonable. When you dig

(17:59):
up something from two an a million years ago, you've
got nothing to go on, right, So we have to
actually do some of this work to establish robust or
strong analogies that we can use. Now you've mentioned your
own experiences creating stone tools. How long does it take
you to create a hand axe? Oh? Yeah, I mean

(18:20):
it takes me maybe half an hour. I'm a little
bit slow with that. Uh and uh, you know it
depending on how nice you want to make it. And
that's already assuming that I'm I'm sitting in my outdoor
lab with a pile of rocks right next to me,
and I just start making the thing. You know, if,
of course, in prehistory you would have had to go
get the rocks and all these other things take a

(18:41):
lot more time. But yeah, uh, something that's that's quite
good at it nine twelve to fifteen minutes, you can yea. Yeah,
So you mentioned that we think a lot of these
early stone tools were used in butchering meat. Have you
ever had food prepared with stone tools you've made? Uh, well,
let's see myself. Uh yeah, only actually recently one of

(19:02):
my colleagues had a pig roast where we used some
of the stuff that I had made. Yeah, but back
in uh in in graduate school. And it's quite common
in these labs and places where people do this sort
of work to have the occasional animal roast where you uh,
and you you learn things like you know that obsidian
um is really sharp and great, but it also crumbles

(19:24):
and leaves little bits of like glassy kind of gridgy stuff. Yeah,
not so great. I like flint better. So do we
find uh, do we find little grains of obsidian and
ancient teeth? I'm not aware. Um, you know, there's always
I'm not well versed in later prehistory, and so it's
possibily there's something out there about that. I'm not aware

(19:45):
of them actually getting any dental wear from the stone tools.
Of course, you get very similar looking dental where when
you you eat like a tubersy dug out of sandy ground,
so you do get cut marks on teeth, which is
very interesting because a way commonly to eat things if
you don't use silverware or chop sticks or anything like that,

(20:05):
is you hold it up to your mouth, you clench
it in your teeth, and you cut away from from there,
so you're cutting right next to your mouth, and occasionally
they did hit their teeth um, and so you get
these little little cut marks on the front teeth and spatingly. Sorry, Yeah,
a lot of things gross, but one of the one
of the cool things. You can actually infer which hand
was used because there is a you know, a sort

(20:27):
of in ergonomics. You're slicing down and in one direction,
so you can tell, and so people use that to
identify early examples of predominantly right handed populations. So even
the gross stuff, there's always something you can you can
get out of it, you know. We encourage you to
mention all the gross stuff. We're not We don't shy
away from that here. So how is the study of

(20:47):
modern stone tool users such a such as a stone
tool users in New Guinea? How is this informed our
understanding of ancient stone tool use? Basically, the whole goal
of experimental archie apology is to generate analogies that we
can observe in the modern day UH to understand the past. UM.
One of the things we have to be careful about though,

(21:10):
is that when you design experiments and you control things,
you build in a lot of your own assumptions, even
if you're not aware of them, about how things are
done or why things are done and so forth. You're
also dealing with a very artificial environment in the lab
and without any social context or anything like that. UM.
So another source of analogy UM that you can use
to understand the past is UH ethnographic observation UM. And

(21:33):
by that I would tress it you you can include
also people for instance, in the United States that do
this as a hobby. There's a community, there's things we
can learn from them. I was lucky enough to uh
to visit some modern toolmakers in New Guinea that are
part of a different tradition uh back in I was there,
um and one of the things that that that just

(21:53):
broadens the number of different examples of ways to do
things UM that we can use to understand the past. UM.
And one of the one of the really cool things
about it was I was expecting this to be a
very uh you know, very foreign experience, experience to be
in the highlands of New Guinea, and but once we
got to the stone tools, they talked about a lot
of the same things that I, as an archaeologist was

(22:14):
already used, where they had names for the for the
same kinds of features of the stone tools and they
uh So there's a real common ground there because we
were all based on things that happened when you try
to break stone in a controlled way. And then that's
very validating for an archaeologist because it means we can
expect that even moving them to the total unknown of
the past, there's gonna be these constants that shaped human
behavior and if we can understand them today, it looks

(22:36):
like they affect different people from very different cultural backgrounds
in similar ways. And so so that's very validating. UM.
The other thing that was really exciting there is is
just how they incorporated stone tool making into their own
particular cultural and social contextu UM, which obviously, if you
study hobbyists in the industrialized West is one context. But

(22:58):
this was horticultural contact. And the way they had a
sort of a system of apprenticeship for learning this, and
the just the amount of time that it takes to
become an expert in the they had a particularly you know,
advanced kind of toolmaking UM. But the the this year
effort and the social values they attached to sticking with
it and practicing, the support they provided for learning that way,

(23:20):
I thought, I found that to be all very inspirational
UM for my own research. So in in in dealing
with the stone toolmakers in New Guinea, UM, and I'm
assuming there was a there was a language barrier, there
is a translator, Well what was how did did that
reveal anything or back up anything that you any pre
existing thoughts about the effects of tool use and toolmaking

(23:41):
on language and UH and then the origins of language. Yeah,
well I think it was. There's there's been an idea
for for some time, UM, which were increasingly are articulating that. Uh.
One of the things that may have led to the
evolution of language, in terms of an evolutionary press or
favoring language evolution, is is the need to be able

(24:02):
to teach each other, uh, and particularly the ability to
teach people that you're related to, because then you get
sort of the genetic benefit and all that kind of thing. Uh.
And in New Guinea it was really uh striking the
amount of social support, um in various ways that was
provided for people learning. UM. I found that very informative.

(24:23):
So of course language, you know, talking I have to
do this, don't do that, or we call this this,
you know, and and um also use of language to
tell stories, which establishes, you know, sort of these cultural norms.
They tell a story about someone who is a great
toolmaker because he spent all of his time practicing, and
he neglected his fields and didn't talk to his wife,

(24:46):
you know, and all that sort of stuff. UM. And
that the socializing that they do, they sit together and
it makes it fun. Um. All of these things are
really important to learning something that's very frustrating and difficult. Um,
you know, maybe you can think of analogies in your
own experience. Uh. And so that that was really really cool.
And then just the uh also all of the gesturing,

(25:07):
the pointing, and just the context of having particular places
where you do things. You know, this is where we
go to get the rocks, this is where we all
sit down and make tools together. There was a structure,
so there's so much about what they were doing socially
that resulted in the sustaining of this technology. And I thought,
you know, obviously you can't just project that into a

(25:27):
particular past context. But we need to expand our thinking
broadly to think about these other dimensions and may be
implied by some of the ancient stone tools that we find. Okay,
time to take a quick break, but we will be
right back with more of our conversation than Alright, we're back,
let's jump back in now. Obviously this is a different
question from how the crafting of stone tools might have

(25:51):
changed our neuro anatomy over time. But I wonder does
making stone tools just change the way you in your
life think about your relationship with the earth, Like do
you do you find yourself out walking and looking down
and saying, oh, there's a good one. No, that's not
a good one. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean now,
I mean, particularly if you've been doing a lot recently,
you can't see a rock without picturing it breaking, you know,

(26:13):
it's a uh And of course just doing being an
archaeologist does that too. Um. You know, I'm always looking
at little pebbles and my wife will catch me looking
at the landscaping, you know, and like that would be
a good hammerstone or something. Okay, you know, uh so
so yeah, it does influence. Uh some of the resources
that you're aware of that are really not particularly relevant

(26:34):
for most people in their daily lives, but we're once
incredibly central. Well, I think about ways that that that
type of thinking, um can take on more complex kind
of mental dimensions. Like I think about the way when
I go shopping. Uh, if I'm like picking out produced
to cook with, I can see like a good fresh
piece of produce and I attribute moral goodness to that,

(26:58):
and I see like a bad, rotten piece of produce
and I attribute moral badness to it. Do do you
do you ever feel inklings of that kind of thing?
With rocks. Oh well, there's a certainly I don't know
about the moral dimensions, so certainly, uh, real aesthetic to it.
I mean, you know, I don't know if you're familiar
with with flint, but it's a beautiful rock and the uh,

(27:20):
the sound that it makes and the way that it
breaks when it when it does what you wanted to uh,
is just infinitely pleasing, you know. And I just got
some some really nice bassault as well, which is a
very different kind of of rock and has different but
also really just aesthetically pleasing and you get a real
pleasure out of out of working in Yeah. So you

(27:41):
said you can hear the difference between a good break
and a bad break. Yeah, yeah, this is a question.
I mean, I think it's important, and I've talked to
people who are much more experienced stone toolmakers than I
am that that really emphasized that, you know, the sound
is important, and in fact, we're just in the process
of developing and online tests that people can take where

(28:02):
we play the sounds of a stone flake coming off
and you use a little slider to say how big
you think it was. Uh, So we're trying to see
how much information is actually present in those sounds. Uh,
I know, I know that when we're sitting around napping,
everybody's looking napping being a term we used to talk
about stone tool making, not to be confused with falling sleep,

(28:23):
but it's knocking the flakes, yeah, and napping. I don't
know if it's German or something. They don't even know
where it comes from, but yeah, knocking the flakes off. Anyway,
we're sitting around knocking the flakes off and uh, you know,
all staring down at what we're doing. And then somebody
will strike off a really nice large flake and it
makes this flat, popping sound and everybody just looks up
over it. Then all right, you know. Uh so anyway, long,

(28:47):
so the the we think the sound is is probably
really important, and we're trying to probe that it. It
keeps coming up also in some of the neuroimaging research
that we do, or we look at, uh, stone toolmaking,
and we get these activity in areas that are more
classically auditory and initially wasn't expecting to, but of course
it makes sense. That is interesting and the stuff about

(29:10):
the toolmaking process giving you all these sort of aesthetic
values when you look at rocks or when you hear
the sounds rocks make. Does that, um lead you to
draw any connections between the origins of tool crafting in
the origins of art um. Yeah, sure, you know, in
a informal sort of way. Um. And and and you

(29:33):
know people have have written about these ideas, and this
is another area sort of of contention, particularly with the
hand axes. Uh. They're beautiful, right, they did. They're very appealing. Um.
And there's some argument that in fact, they are much
too beautiful and appealing from no apparent functional benefit, that

(29:53):
this must be one of our earliest examples of you know,
aesthetic sense. Um. But as I mentioned that, it's awfully
hard to demonstrate that in a really compelling way to skeptics. Uh. Um,
it's it's it is hard to say. You do get
these glimmerings of interesting things like, uh, you know, to
make a hand act and they'll be a fossil impression

(30:14):
of a shell that they leave right in the middle
of the center of one of the sides. You know,
it's sort of like they showed it off or was
that an accident? Yuh Um. It is hard to say, um,
But certainly from our perspective, the symmetry, and many of
the aspects of these tools are very aesthetically pleasing, so
we'd like to speculate that there's some relationship. There is

(30:35):
there any indication with any of the any particular hand
axes that are particularly beautiful to modern eye, that they
were in any way, uh, merely ritualistic, that they I mean,
they were not used. Yeah, so it's a it's a
bit hard because it's actually not always possible to show

(30:56):
that that many of the hand axes were used. You
need particular present vaction conditions and evidence to actually demonstrate
that something was used, so we rarely get that. On
the other hand, um, there are examples of things that
look like they couldn't have been used. Um, these are
very rare where there's be like this really giant hand
acts like the length of my forearm, you know, that

(31:16):
somebody made, and in our imagination, it's pretty hard to
come up with a functional reason to do that. So
it seems to have been somebody showing off or just
trying to produce a piece that is somehow appealing to
them or something like that. Yeah, it's it's it's elusive. Um,
there's these these glimmerings of it. So we've already mentioned
a little bit the possible relationships between tool use and

(31:40):
UM and the development of human neuro anatomy. Uh, could
you talk a little bit more about that, like what
some of the leads are and what is the evidence
directly for those connections. I know some of it has
to do with just like correlation of timelines, right right, Well,
I mean, so there's a basic awareness, so we've had
for for a long time that you know, there's a

(32:01):
broad general trend towards brain size increase over human evolution,
with many exceptions and side branches and so forth that
we're discovering now. Um, but yeah, I mean, our brains
are bigger than any of the brains were two millioners ago,
and there's a trend there. Also, you know, the tools
over time, with many exceptions and places where it didn't

(32:22):
happen and so forth, but the most u elaborate sophisticated
tools around hundred thousand years ago. We're much more complex
than the most elaborate sophisticated tools that were around two
million years ago. So there's a trend there. And there
there's two trends side by side, and you know, I
think maybe they're related to each other. Um. Now exactly
how they're related to each other is a more difficult question.

(32:43):
You know, did the brain get bigger and for other
reasons that then spill over into being able to make
tools or where the tools really important? So that like
if you could make a if you're a little bit
faster at making a tool, more reliable at making a tool,
you had a little bit of a reproductive advantage, then
you know, then then then maybe the tools drove it.
Um And those are hard to uh discern exactly. So

(33:08):
that's why we we try to do some of these
experiments where we relate the actual process of making tools.
We've tried to figure out, well, what does it demand
cognitively neurally if there were pressure on being able to
make these tools, these are the things then that would
respond to it. So that's we're just trying to sketch
out some of the basics still at this point, I

(33:29):
think to make that link and to do that, you've
done some research with the neuroimaging and and how that
relates to thinking about tools to making tools. Could you
tell us some more about that. Yeah, so, uh, we've
done a couple of different things. UM. One is what
most people are probably more familiar with, which is a
functional neuroimaging, which typically works somehow related to to blood

(33:54):
flow in the brain responses of neurons, so when they're
active UM. And so we can isolate those areas of
the brain UM that are more active when you make
a particular kind of tool, you know, for instance, the
hand actions that I was talking about versus the earlier, simpler,
old one style tools, and we can say, oh, well,
this is the neural system related to these forms of
cognition UM that is required to do that. So if

(34:17):
there was something that changed in the past associated with
this technology, is most likely to be those systems. Uh.
Then the other thing that we do is actually structural
stuff UM, and that comes in two flavors. Also, you can, uh,
you can look at plastic changes in the brain that
are caused by behavior. And this is something that in

(34:39):
the past, I guess about twenty years or so, people
really become aware that, even over short periods, doing things
like learning to juggle actually changes the physical structure of
your brain, especially things like white matter that sort of
the cables that connect things in your brain. UM. And
so we've applied that also to stone tool making UH
and seeing that training to cand access, for instance, will

(35:01):
increase certain white matter pathways in the brain. UH. Interestingly enough,
these are also white matter pathways that are larger and
modern humans versus chimpanzee. So we know that it's something
that has evolved in our history, and we can relate
it to a behavior that also is observable to have
come along at a certain time in our history. So
we started to strengthen this sorts of infrenial. Well, maybe

(35:23):
these things are related to the evolution of that pathway. UM.
The other thing that we can do that we're really
just starting to look at is uh individual differences in
structure and function of people. So if you get a
large enough sample, there are small differences, for instance, in
the rapidity with which people learn uh different kinds of
stone toolmaking, you know, and you can then correlate with

(35:45):
starting differences in their brain structure or the way that
their brain changes over time. And I think that's really
exciting because we can then also relate that to UH
cognitive tests. So, you know, some of the initial stuff
that we're getting is you know, so if you're pretty
really good at UH planning, for instance, there's a task
called the Tower of London, which you move sort of

(36:06):
rings around on three pegs, and you have to do
it in a particular order. Uh. If you're good at that,
you learn stone tool making faster slightly. Yeah. I think
that's really really fast because we're actually making these links
between particular cognitive operations and kind of types of stone
toolmaking that we can see in the archeological record. Now,

(36:28):
now that the test subjects who learned how to make
stone tools and then you saw the changes in the brain, Um,
were any of them engaged in any activity that was
comparable to stone tool use or construction, like carp injury
or anything prior? Uh yeah, Um, So we actually have

(36:48):
uh data on that that we haven't analyzed yet. We
have people right about their other hobbies and activities and
act We've got a big pile of stuff we've still
got to go through in that study. Um, but you know,
sort of anecdotally, I do know that there were people
from a bunch of different kinds of professions, Like we
had teachers, We did have one sculptor in the project,

(37:08):
and so there we don't yet have any hard conclusions
about that because we need to work with the data.
But one general impression I got there was a little
bit counterintuitive, is that if you have more experience with
some of these things that you might think of as
being you know, conducive to knowing how to make stone tools,
you can actually interfere if you're sort of setting your ways.

(37:30):
Um um so. But there's a lot more to be
done with that. And one of one of the things
that it bothers me is we always do these studies,
you know, with the the typical college undergraduates, and they're
not generally known for being particularly good with their hands.
Um so. Um. I would really like to expand into

(37:52):
different populations in different ages and um but you know,
we're just getting started, because that's where you would find
individuals who were skilled craftman uh craft people in other
school in other areas, right yeah, yeah, yeah, and just
just people that are more commonly doing work with their hands,
you know. Um. Now, I work with people out when

(38:14):
we go do excavations in Ethiopia and the far um
you know is there's their pastoral lists. They have herds
of animals, and they you know, they make little walls
out of stone all the time, and I mean they're
a lot more handy. They might pick it up a
lot faster. So obviously getting the population you want is
one experimental challenge. I would imagine another one if you're

(38:35):
if you're trying to do neuroimaging while people are engaging
in tool tool making. The I mean, don't you have
to hold still? So for fm R I, Yes, for
fm R I you do UM. So there is you know,
a couple kinds of workarounds. UH. One of them is
the the the the the earliest studies that we did,

(38:55):
you know, about eighteen years ago or more. Now, we
used a technique called f DG PET UM and positron
emission tomography UM is something they don't use a lot
for research anymore and brain activation. But one of the
things that lets you do is we injected a radiological
tracer UH into their bloodstream and this is a glucose

(39:17):
analog UH and so it's taken up by basically hungry
cells in the body like they think it's glucose, happens
in the brain and neurons UM and then it emits
radiation small amounts, but this can be this can be
detected by you know, a sensor array around the head.
So basically you can give somebody this injection. Have them
do anything you want, really like they could run around

(39:39):
the block and but we have them sitting in a
chair and make stone tools in an unconstrained way. Then
you walk them over to the scanner about half an
hour later if they've been doing this for half an hour, uh,
and you collect an image of where the glucose built up. Right. Um.
So this is great because you can do it um
and have them do real tasks outside the scanner. UM.

(39:59):
But it's limited because you know, you've got time averaged
over half an hour, and you can only do a
couple of different conditions because it does involve radiation exposure
and you don't want to give anybody too much and
so you know, um, the fm R I you mentioned,
you have to be still. But we can take advantage
of the fact that a little theoretical, but neuroscientists have

(40:19):
largely converged on the idea that one of the ways
we understand what we see other people do is to
internally simulated ourselves in fact using the same neural systems. Uh.
And this is probably an important way that we learned
from others as well, which is an important research question too.
But we can take advantage of that, and we show
people films of toolmaking in the scanner and so this

(40:41):
is most directly relevant to observational understanding and learning from
other individuals. UM. But it does pretty much use overlapping
systems with execution and we've shown that. Uh, So that's
another sort of workaround. And uh a colleague of mine,
Shelby Putt, is using something called functional near infrared spectrography

(41:02):
anyway f near as anyway is what I what I remember, UM,
and that actually uses near infra red visible light that
can penetrate the cranium and get some information on blood
flow from the superficial areas of the brain, and that
you can wear while you're doing something as well. So
there's some a few workarounds that you can do to
actually use neuroimaging techniques. And I wonder, UM, are there

(41:27):
I don't know if anybody's looked at this, but would
there be differences in the brain between UM, doing doing
a task and stone tool creation and simply imagining the task,
Because of all, you know, we've looked on the show
a bunch of times about simply imagining doing something is
very similar in the brain to actually doing it. Yeah. UM,

(41:48):
so it's similar in very interesting and important ways, but
also different in important ways, and particularly in the context
of stone toolmaking, where some of the things that we're
interested in are the actual skill to really deliver the
right amount of force to the right place. UM. We

(42:09):
want to actually tap into that somehow. UM. We did
do an experiment though, UM, in which we were more
interested in the uh, the kind of planning aspects and
the evaluation aspects, and we had just people looking at
stone tools and answering questions about what would be the
good thing to do next, which is basically asking them

(42:30):
to mentally imagine and simulate the actions. And you tap
into different aspects of the task demands there. So we
can use both. But but there are aspects of stone
tool making they're very reliant I think, on actually doing it.
All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we're
gonna jump right back in with our interview. Alright, we're back.

(42:52):
Just recently, I happened to be reading a couple of
papers in UM I think Frontiers in psychology. I believe
about the possible role of UM possible role of tool
use in the development of consciousness. UH. The the idea
under this new framework was that maybe consciousness has something
to do with creating states of objectivity in the mind

(43:16):
where you can sort of like imagine and correctly judge
the properties of an object that is not yourself. Um.
I don't know if you've read that, Marissano. No, this
was I'm sorry. I can't remember the guy's name, but
he's from Europe somewhere. I think he might have been
mas streaked. Okay, yeah, I don't I don't know that,

(43:36):
but um, yeah, I mean there are potential uh links
between consciouness. This is great for me. Actually, I told
you how I, you know, got into this. I thought
I wanted to be a philosopher and I'd love to
get around to consciousness. They say, you know, wait till
after you have tenure, maybe wait to get longer than that,
you know, tell your all the time. Um, but I

(43:58):
do think there is a potential that they're there might
be some way we could gain insight there. You know,
if you think about what are the things that actually
require consciousness, like what is consciousness actually good for? Um?
And you know some people have said basically nothing uh phenomenal,
you know, but but if there is something that it's
good for. It's for tasks that require attention. I mean,

(44:19):
that's what consciousness is. It's attending to things, uh, really
getting the whole brain on board, uh, you know, and
focusing on on this one thing. Um. And I think
that learning a skill like stone toolmaking is the kind
of thing that demands that concentrated attention. And if consciousness
is the way that you get that, if consciousness is

(44:39):
the feeling that you have when you fully attend to things,
then then then maybe there is a relationship there. I
mean some of the other things people you can as
you know, you can get into a car and uh
start thinking about something else and drive to work when
you meant to go to the store and so forth,
which is you know, this sort of zombie stuff is
pretty scary actually the things that you can you without

(45:01):
being aware of it. Um. But things people can't do
are sort of sustain hopefully conversations like what we're having here, uh,
you know, the stay focused, um, very skilled activities. I mean,
if you're like a race car driver, you wouldn't drift
away and think about something else that demands your attention,
demands consciousness. UM. So I think when we pick up
tasks in the past, UM that required people to really

(45:23):
focus and attend. Um, we might be picking up things
that are diagnostic of the need for conscious states. Of course,
one of the interesting things about tasks like that, like
work with your hands, is that it requires a lot
of consciousness when it's new to you, and over time
requires less and less exactly. And that's why you know,
unfortunately we we really have to focus on studying uh,

(45:46):
people who are learning, um, rather than you know, expert
performance is still interesting in many ways, UM, but if
you want to get at the real demands for something
like conscious attention, that's going to happen when you're figuring
it out later on. And I mentioned to some of
the people that can make a hand acts really well
and like, you know, twelve minutes, they don't have to
think about it at all. UM, Someone like me, I
have to attend to it so much that what always

(46:07):
happens is, I know, I give demonstrations of napping and
then I will always wind up cutting myself because trying
to talk about it and do us you know, and
you're not focusing on it. UM. So yeah, is the
more skills you get, the more you can ignore the
low level stuff and think about something else, you know,
like making it a really appealing hand ax versus just
trying to get something you can use. Do you happen

(46:29):
to find that the most beautiful hand axes are also
the best to like, the most functional, useful or those
things generally aligned or not aligned. You'd be surprised the
things that we don't know about stone tools because of
the amount of time that it takes to do proper
experimentation and actually test these sorts of things. So that's

(46:49):
something that people are interested in, but there's only been
a handful of experiments UM that actually looked at you know,
is the symmetry of the hand acts make it a
more or less effective butchery tool? Um? Does the straightness
of the edge matter? Um? Do any of the things
to the thinness of it matter? Uh? And to the
extent that has been shown, like the things like symmetry

(47:09):
don't seem to really matter very much for the function
uh the Uh the evenness of the edge does seem
to be important, and that might be aesthetic for some people. UM.
The sort of extreme thinning of the hand axes that
we find very appealing, I think because it's hard to
do is something that you know, maybe somewhat beneficial because

(47:30):
you have the tool you're carrying around is lighter. Um.
But thus far, there's not a lot of evidence that
things we think of is really aesthetically important about hand
axes are particularly functionally important. So there's another question we
may not know the answer to. But do you think
in general, is it more widely assumed that people in
the prehistoric times would make a hand ax and and

(47:53):
that would be their hand accidentally carried around with them,
or is it something that would be made on site
when it was needed. Yeah, I mean, I think it's
important to uh, for archaeologists and for everybody to to
remember when we think about the past that these is
a huge amount of time over a large area, UM,
and they probably did just about everything at one uh

(48:15):
time or another. Um. I it's some sites where you're
sitting close to raw materials, uh, you know, like there's
a site of box Grove, it's it's pretty close to
these chalk cliffs where the flint is coming right out.
They seem to have used them lightly and discarded them,
probably made them pretty close to the time that they

(48:35):
were going to use them, and that sort of thing. UM. Elsewhere.
They may have actually carried them around for when you
don't have as much rock, you know, and you're going
far from the source, you probably take the hand x
with you, and when it gets dull, you re sharpen
it and all these sorts of things. Maybe you keep
using it till you've whittled it down the way we
do a pencil nub, you know. Uh, so this is
an area people try to understand, um, basically the economics.

(48:58):
This is sort of an economic question. Uh, you know,
when does it make sense to just toss the hand
axe versus you know, carrying it with you and resharpening it.
And it seems to be driven by the things you
would expect it to be driven by, like distances from
raw materials and the kind of activities that you're doing.
So you probably get asked this question a lot, especially
this year since it's such a milestone year for the film.

(49:19):
But we recently talked about the about two thousand and
one of Space Odyssey on the show, Um, what are
your thoughts about two thousand one Space Audience? Specifically of course,
these scenes of these these ancient creatures engaging in tool
used for the first time. Yeah, well, I mean as
you may you may be aware of that two thousand

(49:40):
one was actually UH produced in consultation with archaeologists and
palaeo anthropologists, so it was informed by current UH speculations
hypotheses about the origins of technology at the time. UM
I think that we have a a different view and now,

(50:00):
UM I think if you would ask most most archaeologists
about the origins of tool use and technology, they get
very excited about things like cooperation and collaboration UH as
as being a real turning point for for humans, and
we are a very cooperative species and this makes a
lot of things possible, whereas that vision UM was much

(50:22):
more about the importance of killing each other UH and
the sort of you know, the the killer ape basically.
And if you want to take a step back from that,
there's a lot of my my other colleagues and in
anthropology and other disciplines who might point out that these
things are heavily influenced by our own social views at
the time about what's important, because some of it's is

(50:43):
you know, UH, myth making about human origins and what
we think human nature is. And after World War Two
it seemed pretty obvious we're all about killing each other
right now, we'd like to think it's about cooperation. Uh,
I don't want to go too heavy on that, because
there actually is uh empirical are there are empirical arguments
that they can be made about this, in particular looking
at comparisons across species and the importance of cooperation versus

(51:06):
competition in different contexts. So there is a framework for
for doing this. But it is interesting to think about
our biases. But are certainly two thousand one fantastic film.
I like I wish the introductory segment where a little
bit quicker because I like to use it in my classes.
But we had to sit there for like half a
students aren't up for it. Um. Yeah, so I think

(51:27):
it's uh. They did their best to work with the
current understanding at the time. It's a great movie. This
is another realm where we might ask you to speculate
if you're comfortable. But one of the things we talked
about with two thousand one was the idea that you know,
so when the the ape like creatures first encounter the
monolith in the in the Savannah, um, they they are

(51:49):
changed in some way. But it's often assumed that maybe
this is some alien technology that goes in and changes
something in their brain. But an interpretation we talked about
in the episod so it is one that that's actually
not what happens. That what happens is they see this
object in their environment that it's nothing like the rest
of their environment. It looks completely artificial, and it's simply

(52:11):
seeing that spurred something in their imagination that allowed them
to to take up the tools. Um. And that makes
me wonder about what what what would you imagine could
be the role of simply seeing things in the environment
to inspire the taking up and creation of tools. Yeah,

(52:32):
I mean it's probably, uh, probably very important. I think
this is the kind of thing that that archaeologists are
loath to actually talk about because you're talking about like, uh,
you know, individual acts of invention um that happened in
the past. Whereas the sort of the record that we

(52:52):
have is this really really high level, average sort of
sort of thing. Um. So it's hard for us. I mean, clearly,
you know, we shouldn't forget these things are inventions. They're
not like mutations or just inevitable things that happened like
somebody at some point had a new idea and did it,
and then whether they were inspired by particular things in

(53:14):
their environment. We like to think about, well, what kind
what were the kinds of things that they commonly encountered,
and we could have some leverage to talk about that.
You know, if they moved into a bit of a
of a foraging niche, then they may be around these
animal bones, you know, if there are stones available, Uh,
if they cracked nuts, um occasionally, as chimpanzees do, you're

(53:34):
going to accidentally fracture the rock and and you know,
you could imagine imagine an aha moment there, but those
are things that are very difficult to actually get to. Um.
What I what I will say about the vision in
in two thousand one is that it is an idea
of a transformative moment um. And this is something that
was also very current and maybe is to a certain extent,

(53:57):
the idea that the invention of the earliest owned tools
should be some kind of transformative, great leap forward that
you know, that changed everything, and that doesn't seem to
be the case actually. I mean, we now have one
site at three point three million where they made stone tools.
The next one is at two point six million, with
nothing in between. Now we're going to find eventually something,

(54:19):
but it's not a lot. It didn't like take off
and go crazy. And and even at the two point
six there's just a few and it's not around two
million years ago that they start doing this regularly in
a lot of places. So there's this huge long period
of time where they're again stone tools. Maybe you could
do it sometimes when it's worth it, I don't know.
And so it wasn't like this sort of you know
gun that went off and everything changed, which is a

(54:42):
different perspective than what we used to have. Well it
thinks it makes me think about even today and in
modern society. You know, you have a new business as
a new type of product, and it's always losing money
at first, right. Uh, it makes me wonder if, yeah,
were these things um more trouble than they were worth
to begin with, and how if that's the case, how

(55:03):
would you get through that? You know, how would you
trust it to keep making them? Yeah, I mean it's
hard to say. I think you know, my my favorite
sort of hypothesis right now is that, yeah, it was
just too too hard in particular the investment in learning
how to do this. Uh, you know they did there
were smaller brained individuals. They didn't have the same learning

(55:25):
capacities that we have. And for whatever at the time,
I think there was too steep a cost, and occasionally
it seemed worth it, but only a few individuals would
learn and and then they had to spend so much
time figuring it out that you know, it was didn't
really give them that much of an advantage, and then
it was just lost in a small population. And no,
we did it for however long you know, um, but
you go on long enough, and there may have been

(55:46):
some selection either on the toolmaking or on other things
that they were doing that eventually lowered the costs for
them a little bit. It wasn't quite such a stretch
to be able to do this, and that's where I
have the chance of it actually paying for itself, and
then it would take off. So that's currently because when
it does take off around two million years ago, it
is very close in time to the appearance of Homo erectus,

(56:06):
which has a larger brain and body, so you know, coincidence.
But they messed around for a long time until something
changed about the cost benefit equation. I think so many
tantalizing mystery I'm just imagining these sort of many dark ages. Uh,
and they're learning Huh. Yeah, I mean if you think
of these small groups very isolated, you know, I mean,

(56:28):
somebody could have a great idea and then you know,
they have a bad year and everybody dies and nobody
thinks of it again for five years. I'm sorry we
keep asking you to speculate about stuff. Uh, these are
the kind of questions we love to ask. But yeah,
I mean, obviously people should understand that they're there are
tons of limitations on what we can know empirically about

(56:51):
things this far in the past. So besides what we've
talked about so far, what else do you find most
fascinating about studying stone age technology? Like? What what really
gets your gears going about it? I mean, I I guess, uh,
one thing, maybe it's a bit a bit technical. We
we we started to talk about the relationship between stone
toolmaking and language, and uh, one of the ideas that

(57:14):
we discussed is that it created selective pressures of benefit
for being able to communicate better, which eventually led to language.
But there's another idea that, uh, that there's a more
direct connection between toolmaking language because they might depend upon
some of the same cognitive and neural systems, right. Uh
So this is an old idea, you know, relating to

(57:36):
the idea that there's kind of a syntax of action,
that the way we structure uh, sequential actions is similar
to the way we structure words and a sentence. In fact,
words and a sentence are sequential actions. Uh. So there's
clearly some really important differences. Um. But there's also the
possibility that some of the systems that we use just

(57:57):
to put together complex sequences of actions and toolmaking are
also important to language evolution, so that if you had
selection acting on toolmaking, it would provide a foundation from
which then you could get language evolution. And you know,
some of the work that we've done generally supports that
idea that there is overlap, particularly in what people call

(58:17):
Broca's area of the inferior frontal gyrus, which is related
to language processing but also uh to putting together complex
actions of other kinds. Uh. And so currently what we're
working on is actually putting people in the scanner or
showing them videos of toolmaking, have them listen to language. UH.
We use computational methods to to parse the structure of

(58:40):
the language and the structure of the toolmaking, and we
see if the kind of the syntactic structure that we
see in the toolmaking and in the language produces the
same responses in the brain. And uh, that's not done yet,
but so far we have some encouraging results along those lines.
So this, this idea that uh, basic action sequencing and
statistical learning that you would have for putting together complex

(59:03):
actions provided the foundation for language evolution is something that
I would like to continue pursuing. That's fascinating. I mean,
if you even if you just think about your experience
in there, there are ways that putting together a sentence
can sometimes feel somewhat analogous to step by step activities
with the hands, like the way that uh, you know,
if you're used to speaking or if you're used to

(59:25):
doing an activity, it can happen like we were talking about,
mostly unconsciously. But then there are those moments where you
feel you're maybe ready to break the sentence or something,
and you slow down and it becomes more conscious. Um
in anyway, that's just what made that made me think
of very much. So, uh, you know that Morton Christiansen
is another colleague of mine that's written a bit about

(59:45):
the concept of language as a skill, and you think
about it, uh, try not to think about it while
I'm speaking. And that that's the point, because if you're
attending to exactly how you're enunciating the words and so forth,
you lose the threat of what you're trying to say.
So you need to be able to very rapidly translate
sort of a high level and tension into very particular
motor actions. And then when you talk to me, I

(01:00:07):
have to very rapidly translate what you're saying into a
sort of a loose summary. I mean, I can't remember
exactly what you said five minutes ago, but hopefully I
have a general idea of what we've been talking about. Uh.
And so this is skill. It's it's just like when
you uh A famous example a is you know, skiing
down a mountain slope. I mean, initially, if you don't
know what you're doing, you're focused on how you're positioning

(01:00:28):
your feet and so forth. Later on you can ignore
that and focus on, you know, skiing the slope, and
and so your focus of attention moves um in this
the same in language and toolmaking, and I think the
neural systems are related to each other. Yeah, it's kind
of like how if you I think they're actually even
studies of this that if you focus too consciously on,
say like shooting a basketball, you get worse at it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

(01:00:50):
Experience the flow, you know, you have to, you have to,
you have to automate a lot of it. Well, Detrich,
this has been so great. Thank you so much for
joining us today. Thank you, thank you. I really enjoyed it. Alright,
So we hope you enjoyed our conversation with Dietrich Stout.
I know Robert and I did. Um So if you

(01:01:11):
want to follow up and check out any of the
centers we mentioned, like the Center for Mind Braining Culture
that's c MBC, dot Emory, dot E d U, but
you can also we'll put a link to that on
the landing page for this podcast. You can also check
out the Paleolithic Technology Laboratory site at scholar Blogs, dot Emory,
dot E d U, slash Stout Lab. And then there
was one more thing that Dietrich emailed me about. So

(01:01:33):
he talked in the interview about the role of sound
in toolmaking, and so he sent me actually a link
to a study where you can be a participant in
trying to It's a study where they ask you about
your experience with certain types of you know, like playing
a musical instrument or something like that, and then you
get to listen to different stone napping sounds and estimate

(01:01:56):
the size of the chip that was produced by the
sound you're listening to. Oh nice, I guess not produced
by the sound, but that the sound was correlated with
And we'll make sure the link for that is on
the landing page as well. In the landing page for
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your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's where we
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