technology

Drake Bennett in Businessweek takes on evolutionary anthropology this week in a profile of Robin Dunbar ("The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks"). If you don't know why Businessweek would be profiling a primatologist, then you probably don't know about Robin Dunbar's work with group size and communication.

Dunbar proposed that the size of social groups is limited by our evolutionary history. Our social interactions require us to track social relationships with many people. People aren't capable of following the details of thousands of city-dwellers, we are better suited to follow details of a single city block. In Dunbar's model, we should be well adapted to track the number of people that would have occupied social groups in the distant past.

Humans can keep track of only a limited number of people, and for most social primates the group size is even smaller. Dunbar's research on primate groups led him to believe that group size is correlated with brain size among species of social primates. Given this, we might expect that the exceptionally large size of the human brain would correspond to an exceptionally large group size. By drawing a regression among brain size and group size estimates for many primate species, Dunbar arrived at the prediction that human group size should be 150 people. That became known as the "Dunbar number".

Later, as the article recounts, technologists interested in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter became interested in the concept. What if the sizes of social networks on these alternative media platforms is similarly limited by our evolutionary heritage? Surely there is big money to be made for the company that can use this evolutionary knowledge to make big money?

But the naive understanding of a hard "number" limiting human social interactions doesn't fit the evolutionary evidence.

Others, anthropologists and brain scientists in particular, challenge the evolutionary story Dunbar tells, arguing that it discounts other factors that might have driven the development of the big human brain—the pressure to figure out more efficient ways to forage, or the need to surmount the defense mechanisms of the plants and animals our ancestors wanted to eat. “Ecological pressures like avoiding predators, finding food and shelter, choosing habitats—all these kinds of decisions. I think they played a role” in brain growth, says Reader, the biologist.

Researchers who’ve used different methods to measure the size of a person’s social circle have come up with numbers that don’t match Dunbar’s. One set of studies by the anthropologist Russell Bernard and the network scientist Peter Killworth found a mean social network size of 291. Another paper, published this month in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, came up with 611.

Like many, I used to be annoyed about the idea of the "Dunbar number". Human hunter-gatherers have a huge range in actual group sizes, as do most social primates. A girl might be born in a group of 20, see that group swell or merge with other groups to 100 or more, transfer to a different group along with a sister, and marry outside her social group entirely. Over a lifespan, she may face many different group sizes, and have "tight" relationships with other individuals born more than a century apart.

No single number could describe this complexity. People vary extensively in their social interactions and knowledge of other peoples' social lives. Some people track hundreds of others, some people are relative shut-ins and know only a few. Human environments are novel today in many ways relative to our evolutionary history, but the sheer scope of variation in sociality belies the notion that we come from a monolithic history. It makes about as much sense as saying that human mass is 65 kg and not recognizing the development (from 3 kg at birth) and extensive variation in mass among individuals.

My attitude has softened toward the Dunbar number, because it does capture something about the scale of social networks. Humans are not all 65 kilograms, but more than 99 percent of adult humans are within factor of two of that. Most of the time, when articles describe the concept of the Dunbar number, they describe it in ways that signify scale rather than an exact number. From this article, for example:

A paper published in 2011 found that on Twitter the average number of other people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200. And though the limit on how many Facebook friends one can have is a generous 5,000, the average user has 190—more than 150, but within what Dunbar sees as the margin of error.

If 190 is within the margin of error of 150, we're talking about a scale within a factor of at least 1.3. And that's on a mean -- not on the actual variation.

Cognitive limits do constrain our behavior. But species-wide cognitive limits have almost no ability to predict the sizes of particular groups. Hence orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees have very different social group sizes despite similar brain sizes. And cognition isn't dedicated to a single social function; there are many:

Morin likes to point out that it’s misleading to talk about a single Dunbar Number. Dunbar actually describes a scale of numbers, delimiting ever-widening circles of connection. The innermost is a group of three to five, our very closest friends. Then there is a circle of 12 to 15, those whose death would be devastating to us. (This is also, Dunbar points out, the size of a jury.) Then comes 50, “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africa,” Dunbar writes in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Beyond 150 there are further rings: Fifteen hundred, for example, is the average tribe size in hunter-gatherer societies, the number of people who speak the same language or dialect. These numbers, which Dunbar has teased out of surveys and ethnographies, grow by a factor of roughly three. Why, he isn’t sure.

One way to look at it is scaling: Larger groupings are in some ways metagroups: composed themselves of smaller groups that can act semi-independently. These dynamics are limited in scope before the metagroups disintegrate under their own complexity.

But I think the null hypothesis is that we are imposing this scaling on the data. A factor-of-three difference is just wide enough for an analyst to separate biological distributions without much overlap. Try to sort human activities into different sizes of groups, and you'll get a factor-of-three separation automatically.

Are different "levels" of social relationship really adaptively different? If they are, we might be drawing upon different cognitive resources for different levels of relationship -- one kind of thinking for close friends, another kind for distant acquaintances. If instead the appearance of different levels is really just a consequence of mapping a continuous distribution into different sizes of groups, then the levels may not be adaptively different, and we may be using the same cognitive resources in ways scaled to our knowledge of the individuals involved. That adaptive question has to shape the way we conceive of limits on cognition, and the relationship between cognitive evolution and social dynamics. It will be more complicated than a single number.

This week in Science, Jayne Wilkins and colleagues report on part of the lithic assemblage from Kathu Pan, South Africa, which includes 210 points [1]. The paper reports that these are the earliest known hafted points in the world, predating the previous record by more than 200,000 years.

The minireview of the spear literature:

By ~780 ka, hominins were regularly killing large game, based on evidence of repeated in situ processing of complete carcasses of fallow deer at Gesher Benot Ya’kov in Israel (4). At the English site of Boxgrove, a horse scapula with a semicircular perforation is consistent with spear-aided hunting by ~500 ka (5). Wooden spears dating to ~400 ka have been found in association with butchered horses at Schöningen, Germany (6). Hafted spear tips appear to be common in the MSA and Middle Paleolithic (MP) sites of Europe and Africa after ~300 ka (7–20).

This is a very short paper, and it sets out two problems: demonstrating that the points really are 500,000 years old, and demonstrating that they really were used as spear tips. The first is fairly straightforward as a function of the stratigraphy at the site and some ESR/U-series dating of faunal teeth. Possibly a broader issue is the identification of the assemblage as Fauresmith, which has been poorly defined in the literature and sometimes means different things. It is more or less indicative of assemblages based on large cutting tools (such as handaxes), with an increased fraction of flake core production and some MSA-like elements. Andy Herries published a good review of the Fauresmith issue and its chronology last year [2]. He wrote this with respect to Kathu Pan:

Previous dating of the site was based on elephant fossils that were more evolved than those from Olduvai Bed IV [62]. This simply gave the site an age of 417 ka may lend weight to the Fauresmith at Wonderwerk also being in this time range or at least older than 182 ka as suggested by Chazan and Horwitz [147] unless it occurred for over 200 ka in the region and was being produced contemporarily with the MSA.

Fauresmith at some other sites in southern Africa, including Wonderwerk Cave, is apparently younger, less than 300,000 years ago. The entire range is coincident in time with the Early-Middle Stone Age transition in the Kapthurin Formation sites in Kenya, which makes these "transitional" assemblages really representative of a long-term pattern of variability and change. The marker of MSA industries as opposed to Early Stone Age is the MSA's reliance upon prepared core reduction techniques. Yet, prepared core techniques (like the Levallois technique) appear much, much earlier. One marker of the MSA, as reviewed by Herries [2] (citing McBrearty and others) is the appearance of projectile point technology:

Mcbrearty [22] also suggests that the fundamental change from the ESA to the MSA is the end of LCTs and a shift to projectile point technology. Of course, it should be noted that Acheulian bearing hominins in Europe were utilising an entirely wooden projectile technology for hunting as shown by the occurrence of the Schöningen spears at either ~400 (MIS 11 [157]) or ~310 ka (MIS 9d-e; [168]) but were seemingly still disarticulating their kill with LCTs. Whether a similar wooden projectile technology was being used by hominins in Africa is almost impossible to tell given the almost complete lack of preservation of such organic remains in most MSA sites. The exceptions are two wooden tools from Floor 1 at Kalambo Falls in Zambia [30, 56] and one from Florisbad in South Africa [13]. Other sites where large pieces of wood have been recovered include the Acheulian sites of Amanzi Springs [73] and Gesher Benot Ya'aqov [169]. Despite the discovery of significant amounts of wood from these deposits, no tools have been noted. The Kalambo falls tools are reminiscent in some ways of the European “spears” and are associated with large well-formed cleavers from the Acheulian bearing Floor 2, below the Sangoan. Given their context these wood tools might be older than those from Europe and might point to a wooden projectile point technology in the late Acheulian, complimenting the earlier LCT technology. At most sites, the only clue would be in finding injury patterns on faunal remains indicative of such activities. In a similar vein, the co-occurrence of LCTs and projectile point technology in the Sangoan and Fauresmith may reflect similar activity patterns, or as McBrearty [22] suggests that the mix of technologies may, in fact, represent different hominins using different technologies at the same time in the same regions of Africa.

This brings us to the current paper, which pushes the appearance of projectile points back well before the clear appearance of the MSA. So is the evidence solid?

Triangular stone flakes may look on the surface like spear points, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were used that way. Triangular flakes are useful cutting tools, and actually preferred as cutting tools in some archaeological contexts.

The springbok spear test. Figure S6D from Wilkins et al. 2012

I think the authors did a nice job of finding multiple ways to test the use of these points as spear tips. They examined edge wear to show that on these artifacts it is differentially concentrated near the tip. They shot a bunch of experimentally-produced tips into springbok carcasses, showing the pattern of wear that comes from use on a hafted spear, and this pattern matches the archaeological points. Furthermore, they show that experimental use of the points as cutting tools yields a different wear pattern, as does postdepositional damage to the artifacts. They find that some of the points are modified on the base, suggesting hafting, but do not report any evidence of glue or base wear that would have come from the wooden spear. A clever part of their analysis concerns the symmetry of the points. They expected that as a cutting tools is blunted and resharpened, the shape of the overall tool will become skewed, so smaller points should be less symmetrical. The archaeological points show the opposite pattern, with smaller points just as symmetrical as the large ones. The sizes of the points fall within the range of ethnographic and MSA spear points, not smaller projectiles such as arrows or atlatl darts.

So all in all, these look like good spear tips. This seems like yet another case where a more intensive investigation of the African record has shown that supposedly "advanced" toolmaking techniques were mastered by Middle Pleistocene humans. With some of the other techniques -- such as blade production -- people seem to show an effervescent pattern. A handful of sites show an early occurrence of the technique but no clear tradition carrying the early innovation into later time periods. Maybe hafting is another such case, a relatively complex innovation that was repeatedly reinvented, with people repeatedly falling back to the simpler option (in this case, sharpened wood spears without points).

The archaeological record may be giving us a signal of the importance of communication and knowledge accumulation relative to innovation in our prehistory. But to be clear about this will require a fuller record, with fewer blank spots.

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