Innovation, life history and social networks in human evolution

There is a famous puzzle about the first 3 million years of archaeologically visible human technological history. The pace of change, of innovation and its uptake, is extraordinarily slow. In particular, the famous handaxes of the Acheulian technological tradition first appeared about 1.7 Ma, and persisted with little change until about 800 ka, perhaps even longer. In this paper, I will offer an explanation of that stasis based in the life history and network characteristics that we infer (on phylogenetic grounds) to have characterized earlier human species. The core ideas are that (i) especially in earlier periods of hominin evolution, we are likely to find archaeological traces only of widespread and persisting technologies and practices; (ii) the record is not a record of the rate of innovation, but the rate of innovations establishing in a landscape; (iii) innovations are extremely vulnerable to stochastic loss while confined to the communities in which they are made and established; (iv) the export of innovation from the local group is sharply constrained if there is a general pattern of hostility and suspicion between groups, or even if there is just little contact between adults of adjoining groups. That pattern is typical of great apes and likely, therefore, to have characterized at least early hominin social lives. Innovations are unlikely to spread by adult-to-adult interactions across community boundaries. (v) Chimpanzees and bonobos are characterized by male philopatry and subadult female dispersal; that is, therefore, the most likely early hominin pattern. If so, the only innovations at all likely to expand beyond the point of origin are those acquired by subadult females, and ones that can be expressed by those females, at high enough frequency and salience for them to spread, in the bands that the females join. These are very serious filters on the spread of innovation. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.