The Role of Culture in Human Adaptation

[Figure 1]

Surviving in a Cold, Cruel World

This photo was taken in a museum devoted to Neanderthals, the archaic humans
that lived in Europe and Asia during the last ice age. The model of the Neanderthal
man in the photo illustrates some of the important cultural adaptations that allowed
Neanderthals to control and exploit their environment. Without culture, it is unlikely
that Neanderthals would have been able to survive in a cold climate.

What Is Culture?
Culture is the entire way of life for a group of people. It includes all the learned skills
and knowledge that people share with other members of their society. During human
evolution, our biological traits and culture reinforced one another, and it is likely that
neither could have developed fully without the other. When human ancestors
became bipedal, for example, it freed their hands to devote more time and effort to
making and using tools. The ability to make tools may have been one stimulus for
the evolution of a bigger brain. A bigger brain, in turn, helped early humans invent
more useful tools and better ways to solve problems.

Human culture has four important characteristics:

1. Culture is learned. People are not born with culture, but they acquire it
from those around them as they grow up. From a young age, children are
ready and able to learn culture, but the specific culture they learn depends on
the culture in which they grow up.
2. Culture is shared. People with the same culture share the same ways of
thinking and behaving. They also share their culture with the next generation
by passing it on to their children, like the mother in the photo below.
3. Culture is symbolic. A symbol is a word, sign, or action that stands for
something else. Spoken or written language is based on symbols (words).
The ability to share culture depends on language.
4. Culture is adaptive. Culture lets people live almost anywhere on Earth. It is a
powerful tool that allows people to survive in harsh climates. As a result,
people depend on culture to survive.
[Figure 2]
Human children learn about their culture and the world around them starting at a young age. This mother is teaching her children
about wildlife at a wildlife refuge.

Culture increasingly became the main way that human ancestors adapted to the
environment, starting as early as Homo habilis. Culture is by far our primary method
for adapting to the environment today. Culture allowed our ancestors to thrive and
spread into new areas. Humans first lived in the tropics and were physically adapted
for a warm climate. In fact, in terms of their biology, humans are still tropical animals.
Eventually, however, humans moved into colder areas. When they did, culture
allowed them to live in cold climates without the need to adapt biologically. For
example, they did not have to develop thick fur or a layer of blubber like other cold-
climate mammals. Instead, they used fire, built shelters, and made clothes to stay
warm.

Language
Language is the communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of
arbitrary symbols — called words — that are represented by vocal sounds, and in
many cases by written marks, as well. Language is arguably the single most
important component of culture, because much of the rest of culture is shared
through language. Language allows people to share their inventions and solutions to
problems with other members of their group. It also allows them to pass on to
subsequent generations cultural knowledge and what they have learned by
experience. In this way, people can continually build on the knowledge that was
developed in the past by their forebears.

Human Language vs. Nonhuman Animal Communication

Most animals (not just humans) communicate with others. Human language,
however, has several traits that set it apart from nonhuman animal communication.
No form of animal communication shows all the traits of human language, nor the
complexity of human language. Some of the main differences between human
language and nonhuman animal communication include the following:

 Human language is learned, whereas most nonhuman animal communication

is instinctive. The ability of humans to use language is biologically based, but
they can learn any language equally well if they are exposed to it at a young
age.
 Human language can be used to communicate about things in other places
and about past or future events. In nonhuman animals, in contrast, most
communication refers to the here and now.
 Human language is composed of individual vocal sounds that are combined
to create words, which are symbols that have meaning. A finite number of
words can be used to create a nearly infinite variety of sentences. Most
nonhuman animal communication, in contrast, is based on a limited range of
sounds or movements that can convey only basic information.
Producing and Comprehending Speech
Some of the cultural adaptations of the Neanderthals, as described below, most
likely would have required them to have a relatively sophisticated means of
communication. Physiological evidence based on fossils and DNA also suggests
that Neanderthals were probably able to produce and comprehend speech. Most
likely, they were the first humans to be able to do so.

The speech centers of the brain are the areas of the brain involved in producing and
comprehending speech, and they are highlighted in the figure below. For
comparison, the figure shows both a human brain and a chimpanzee brain. The
region called Broca’s area controls speech production, and the region
called Wernicke’s area controls speech comprehension. Both areas were
apparently well developed in Neanderthals, and it is said they were as large as they
are in modern human brains.
[Figure 3]
Broca's and Wernicke's areas are larger in the modern human than the chimpanzee brain. This reflects a greater capacity for and
dependence on vocal communication through the use of language in humans.

Modern humans have an allele for a gene called the FOXP2 gene, and it
is necessary for human language as we know it. The allele is needed both for
understanding grammar and for controlling movements of the mouth needed to
produce speech. Recent analysis of Neanderthal DNA shows that this allele was
present in the Neanderthals sampled. It provides more evidence that Neanderthals
were capable of producing and comprehending speech.

Another biological marker of speech production is a bone in the neck called the
hyoid bone (see figure below). The function of this bone is to support muscles
involved in speech production, including muscles of the jaw, tongue, and larynx. In
modern humans, the hyoid bone is located high in the throat, where it allows us to
make a wide range of sounds. Its position and shape are essentially the same in
Neanderthals, suggesting that they may also have been capable of producing a wide
range of vocal sounds.

[Figure 4]
The shape and position of the hyoid bone is related to the human ability to produce a wide range of vocal sounds. It supports
muscles involved in speech production.

It's unknown whether or not humans earlier than the Neanderthals could produce
speech. There is no clear-cut evidence for it. Based on their skulls, it is possible
that Homo heidelbergensis also had well-developed speech centers in the brain.
However, this evidence is indirect, and any conclusions about Homo
heidelbergensis and language are speculative.

Subsistence Strategies
The term subsistence strategy refers to the general way in which a group of
people obtain food and the types of food they rely on most. It is possible to
determine what many of our ancestors ate based on evidence, such as tooth-wear
patterns and the types of food scraps found in association with their fossils. It
appears that australopithecines and Homo habilis relied mainly on gathering wild
plant foods, supplemented with the occasional scavenging of small animals for
meat. They probably also collected eggs, grubs, and insects for food, much as
chimpanzees do today.

With the evolution of Homo erectus, there was an increase in the proportion of meat
in the diet. Meat from larger animals was scavenged from the kills of large predators.
Small animals were hunted for their meat. At late Homo erectus sites, there is
evidence of refuse bones from a wide range of animals, including small animals,
such as rabbits and rodents and also large animals, such as deer and rhinoceroses.
Some late Homo erectus also ate a variety of fish and shellfish, such as oysters and
mussels. By 500 thousand years ago, Homo erectuswas using virtually every
available animal for food. It is likely that they were also collecting an equally diverse
range of wild plant foods.

It has been argued that the adoption of a diet high in meat by Homo erectus may
have been one of the reasons this human species was able to leave tropical Africa
and move into colder areas of the Old World. The problem with living in a cold area
was not so much the temperature, but the relative scarcity of plant foods during the
winter. Becoming better at hunting and scavenging animals would have
helped Homo erectus deal with this problem.

A subsistence strategy that involves hunting wild animals and collecting wild plant
foods is called hunting and gathering. This subsistence strategy — first adopted
by Homo erectus — was used throughout the rest of human prehistory, until modern
humans first invented agriculture approximately ten thousand years ago. Even
today, small pockets of modern Homo sapiens in isolated regions of the world still
"make a living" by hunting and gathering. You can see members of one such group
in the picture below.
[Figure 5]
!Kung San people (who live in southern Africa) are hunter-gatherers who live a lifestyle similar to their forebears thousands of
years ago. Their shelters are simple constructions, because they must move often to find food and water sources.

Tool Traditions
We know more about the tools made by early humans than we know about their
other cultural adaptations, because many of their tools were made of stone that was
nonperishable. Hundreds of thousands of early stone tools have been discovered,
only some of which are associated with fossil remains of the tool makers. The
earliest, widely-agreed upon stone tools were found in East Africa and have been
dated to about 2.5 million years ago. They were found with fossils of the earliest
members of our genus, Homo habilis, although they could also have been made by
australopithecines. Because these tools were first discovered at Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania, they were given the name Oldowan tools.

The table below shows the different types of tools developed by our human
ancestors and the earliest date for each type. All the stone tool traditions together
are referred to as the Paleolithic (“old stone”) stage of human technological
development. The Paleolithic is further divided into Lower, Middle, and Upper
Paleolithic stages, as shown in the table.

Paleolithic Stage of Human Technological Development

Stage of the Paleolithic Earliest Date (years ago) Tool Tradition(s)

Upper Paleolithic 17,000 Magdalenian

 21,000 Solutrean

27,000 Gravettian

75,000 Aurignacian

Middle Paleolithic 100,000 Mousterian

Lower Paleolithic 1,500,000 Acheulian

2,500,000 Oldowan

Oldowan Tools
Oldowan tools are part of the Lower Paleolithic stage of technological development.
They were made by Homo habilis, and also by early Homo erectus. There were two
main types of Oldowan tools: core tools and flake tools

1. Core tools were made by using a rock as a hammer to knock flakes off
another stone, resulting in a chopping tool that could be held easily in the
hand. The tool could also be used for hammering or digging. You can see an
example of an Oldowan core tool below.
2. Flake tools were the flakes of rock that were removed in the process of
making the core tools. Flake tools were used as knives. They were used, for
example, to butcher animals, as evidenced by cut marks on animal bones
found in association with the tools.
[Figure 6]
Oldowan core tool

Besides stone tools, Homo habilis may have made tools out of other materials, such
as wood or bone. Even grasses could be used to make tools by braiding them into a
rope. However, these materials would not have survived to the present, so there is
no evidence of them today.

Acheulian Tools
Although Homo erectus made Oldowan tools at first, they were increasingly better
made and more efficient than the tools made by Homo habilis. For example, the
cutting tools made by Homo erectus had straighter, sharper edges. By about 1.5
million years ago in East Africa, Homo erectus tools had become advanced enough
to be considered a new tool-making tradition, although they were still part of
the Lower Paleolithic stage of technological development. These new tools were
called Acheulian tools (named for a site in France where this type of tool was first
discovered). Acheulian tools have since been found wherever Homo erectus (and
later Homo heidelbergensis) lived throughout the Old World. Over time, Homo
erectus refined the tools they made, and became increasingly reliant on them. At the
most recent Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis sites, thousands of discarded
stone tools have been found.

The most important tools of the Acheulian tradition were hand axes, like the one
pictured below. These were like the Oldowan core tools, but they were shaped on
both sides with greater skill to form an oval tool with a pointed end and sharp edges
along the sides. These tools were probably used for a variety of tasks, including
butchering, chopping, digging, and cracking open bones and nuts. Other tools made
by Homo erectus included flake knives and scrapers. Like Homo habilis, Homo
erectus probably also made tools out of other materials besides stone, but these
would not have survived to the present.

[Figure 7]
Acheulian hand axe

Mousterian Tools
The tools made by Neanderthals and other archaic humans were more advanced
than the Acheulian tools made by Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis. These
more advanced tools date back to at least 100 thousand years ago, and they have
been given the name Mousterian tools for the site in France where they were first
discovered. Mousterian tools were made not only by archaic humans, but also by
early modern humans in some areas, including southwest Asia and Africa. They are
classified in the Middle Paleolithic stage of technological development.

The most important Mousterian tools were flake tools, rather than the core tools of
earlier traditions. Mousterian flake tools were made with a special method (called the
Levallois technique) that made them more refined and standardized. The flake tools
were also specialized for particular jobs, with different tools for scraping, cutting, or
puncturing. Some were even specialized to be spear points, which is the first time
stone tips were attached to wooden shafts to make spears.

Upper Paleolithic Tools

By about 75 thousand years ago, some early modern humans began making tools
that were significantly different from the earlier Mousterian tools. They have been
categorized in several different tool traditions in the Upper Paleolithic stage of
technological development. These new tools have been found in sites in Europe and
elsewhere in the Old World and more recently in the New World. You can see
sketches of a variety of Upper Paleolithic tools in the figure below. They range from
blades of various shapes and sizes to barbed harpoon heads.
[Figure 8]
Upper Paleolithic tools

Besides barbed harpoon heads, there were other new specialized tools for hunting
in the Upper Paleolithic stage. The spear thrower was invented, most likely by about
17 thousand years ago, during this stage of technological development. The spear
thrower increased the range and force of impact of spears. This allowed hunters to
take down game animals from a safer distance. By about 12 thousand years ago,
the bow and arrow had been invented. This increased the range of projectile
weapons even more. When these hunting tools were invented, game animals were
becoming scarcer, and this may have been the impetus for their invention.

Another new development during the Upper Paleolithic stage was the invention of
tools for making other tools. These included tools that served as chisels and
punches. The upper paleolithic stage was also characterized by increasing
dependence on compound tools, which are tools with multiple parts. The advantage
of compound tools is that they can be repaired if one part breaks. They don't need to
be replaced entirely. Tool-making tools and compound tools were new tool-making
principles — not just new kinds of tools — and this represented a quantum change
in technology.

Other Cultural Adaptations

Besides making and using tools, several other cultural adaptations helped early
humans remain relatively unchanged physically while moving into new areas of the
world. These cultural adaptations included the controlled use of fire, shelters,
clothing, and social adaptations.

Use of Fire
The controlled use of fire by early humans may have been a turning point in human
evolution. It allowed humans to cook food and obtain light and warmth. Light and
heat from fire allowed humans to expand their activities into the dark and colder
hours of the night. It also provided protection from predators and insects. Predators
generally fear and stay away from fires, and insects such as mosquitoes could be
kept away by the smoke. Cooking plant foods would have helped break down tough
plant fibers so they were easier to digest. Cooking meat would not only make it
easier to digest. It would also kill bacteria and parasites that are common in wild
animal meat, making it safer to eat.

Conclusive evidence of widespread controlled use of fire by archaic and early

modern humans dates to approximately 125 thousand years ago. There is some
evidence — though not conclusive — that fire was used as early as 1.5 million years
ago by Homo erectus. If Homo erectus did use fire, it was likely to have been an
important cultural adaptation allowing this species to move out of tropical Africa.

Shelter and Clothing

There is a plethora of evidence to show that Neanderthals lived in rock shelters and
the mouths of caves both in Europe and southwest Asia. An example of a cave once
inhabited by Neanderthals in France is pictured below. Typically, Neanderthals
selected rock shelters and caves that opened toward the south, which would provide
the most exposure to light and warmth from the sun. Evidence also shows that
Neanderthals built temporary lean-to shelters from brush and branches, as well as
simple tents from animal skins. The use of shelters would provide some protection
from cold, wind, and precipitation. This would have been especially important during
the glacial periods of the last ice age when Neanderthals were living in Europe.
[Figure 9]
This cave in France has been fenced off to protect it from people who are curious to see where Neanderthals once lived.

Clothing served the same purpose as shelter: it provided protection from the
elements. Being able to make clothing from animal hides was a major advance in
allowing early modern humans to live in a cold climate. No doubt Neanderthals wore
animal hides as body coverings. However, the ability to make fitted clothing tailored
to the body probably depended on the invention of the sewing needle about 25
thousand to 30 thousand years ago, so this would have been a skill first developed
by early modern humans. This type of clothing would better hold in body heat and
allow a wider range of motion while still keeping the body covered.

Social Support and Social Networks

A diversity of evidence suggests that Neanderthals relied on other people in their
group for social support. Consider the earliest fossils ever found of these archaic
humans. The fossils represent an elderly man who had a number of disabilities,
including severe arthritis in his spine and loss of most of his teeth and part of his
lower jaw. Misinterpretation of this specimen led to the early mistaken ideas that the
Neanderthals were crude, brutish, and dull-witted. What this specimen actually
reveals is that Neanderthals had a system of social support in which an elderly
handicapped individual could survive by being fed and cared for by others. Similar
evidence that care and support were provided to disabled group members has been
found at other Neanderthal sites, as well. Another way in which social support
helped our ancestors was cooperative behavior in hunting. There is evidence, for
example, that early modern Cro Magnon people used coordinated hunting methods
to kill large herd animals.

Social interactions not only within but between groups of early humans may have
helped them survive in a hostile world. By establishing trade relations with other
groups, people may have had broader social networks to rely on when conditions
were especially harsh. They may have been able to trade materials for tools that
were not present in their area, or to gain access to water or food resources that were
temporarily unavailable in their customary range.

Feature: My Human Body

No doubt you have heard of the paleolithic diet, also called the paleo diet. It has
become increasingly well known since it was popularized by Loren Cordain in his
2002 book ThePaleo Diet. It is likely that you know someone who has followed the
diet. You may even have adopted or thought about adopting the diet yourself.
Cordain and other supporters of the diet make it sound so reasonable. But is it
really?

Proponents of the paleo diet claim that it improves health and promotes weight loss.
The diet is based on foods presumed to have been consumed by our Paleolithic
ancestors. It includes meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and roots. It excludes
dairy products, grains, legumes, sugar, and processed foods.

The idea behind the paleo diet is that the healthiest way to eat is how our ancestors
ate during most of the time span of human evolution, when humans were hunters
and gatherers and had not yet adopted agriculture, which is why dairy products and
grains are excluded from the diet. These became common dietary items only after
plants and animals were domesticated about ten thousand years ago. One of the
most important underlying assumptions of the paleo diet is that biological evolution
occurs too slowly for human metabolism to have caught up with the relatively recent
changes in our diet that started with the agricultural revolution. Proponents of the
diet argue that we are biologically adapted for the hunter-gatherer diet of our
ancestors and that eating otherwise spells trouble for our health and our waistlines.

There are several reasons why the assumptions and arguments underlying the
paleolithic diet are flawed. One reason is that we don’t know for certain what our
Paleolithic ancestors ate. We don’t know all the species they ate or in what
proportions. Proponents of the paleolithic diet get around that problem by modeling
the diet on the foods eaten by half a dozen modern hunter-gatherer groups. This
assumes that the groups they chose are typical of all hunter-gatherers, including
hunter-gatherers who lived during the Paleolithic. This assumption has no basis in
fact. There is great variation among modern hunter-gatherer diets. Inuit hunter-
gatherers in northern Alaska, for example, eat a diet very high in meat and fish,
whereas hunter-gatherers in the Peruvian Andes eat mainly starchy vegetables.
Diets of a given hunter-gatherer group may also vary from season to season, and
none of the groups is likely to eat the same diet as their ancestors, even just a few
generations ago. Most modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed into marginal
areas, and some have at least limited access to agricultural and processed foods.

Even if we could determine what our ancestors ate, most of the foods would be
unavailable to us today. You can’t go to your local supermarket and fill your cart with
the same animal and plant foods that Neanderthals were hunting and gathering tens
of thousands of years ago. Wild species have evolved by natural selection
throughout the long period of time since our ancestors ate them. Most of the food
species available to us today — including virtually all the foods in your local
supermarket — have also been intentionally modified by breeders using artificial
selection to change their traits.

The assumption that humans have not had enough time to evolve genetic
adaptations to modern diets is also without merit. Actually, we have had plenty of
time, and there are good examples of genetic adaptations to dietary change
occurring just since the agricultural revolution. Consider milk. A gene encodes the
enzyme lactase, which digests the sugar lactose in milk. Before people began
keeping dairy animals and consuming milk about seven thousand years ago, the
gene normally shut down after infancy. At some point, a mutation occurred that kept
the gene turned on throughout life, resulting in lactose tolerance and the ability to
easily digest milk products after infancy. In the past seven thousand years alone,
this mutation increased rapidly in frequency in populations that kept dairy animals.
For example, at least 80 percent of Europeans and North Americans are lactose
tolerant today. Clearly, we are not biologically identical to our Paleolithic ancestors,
because we have continued to evolve for thousands of years. Even the bacteria in
our gut — which play important roles in digestion and metabolism — have
continuously evolved since their ancestors inhabited ours.

Variability in diets around the world past and present shows that humans can not
only survive but thrive on a wide diversity of diets. Just as humans have evolved to
be adaptable in the face of changing climates and habitats, humans have evolved to
be flexible eaters. If humans had not been nutritionally adaptable, we wouldn't have
been able to colonize so many different habitats, and we would not have adopted
new subsistence strategies, such as agriculture.
Summary
 Culture is the entire way of life of a group of people. It includes all the learned
skills and knowledge that a group of people share. Culture increasingly
became the main way that human ancestors adapted to the environment. It
allowed them to move out of the tropics and live in colder climates without
developing biological adaptations to the cold.
 The ability of people to share their culture depends on language. Language is
the communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary
symbols (called words). Human language differs significantly from nonhuman
animal communication. The earliest humans to use language may have been
the Neanderthals. Their culture, DNA, and physiology all provide support for
the idea that they could produce and comprehend speech.
 Subsistence strategy refers to the general way in which a group of people
obtain food and the types of food they rely on most. At least since Homo
erectus, humans were hunter-gatherers. They hunted a variety of wild animals
and gathered a diversity of wild plant foods. Only after agriculture was
invented around ten thousand years ago did some human populations adopt
a different subsistence strategy. Some people remain hunter-gatherers even
to this day.
 Making and using tools was an important cultural adaptation during human
evolution. The Paleolithic stage of technological development was the long
period during which human species made and used stone tools. It started
about 2.5 million years ago with the simple Oldowan tools of Homo habilis. It
continued with increasingly sophisticated tools made by Homo erectus,
archaic humans, and finally early modern humans.
 Other cultural adaptations that helped early humans remain relatively
unchanged physically while moving into new areas of the world included the
controlled use of fire, shelters, clothing, and social adaptations.
(Jean Brainard, Ph.D., Rachel Handerson, Ph.D., Aug. 5, 2016)

Jean Brainard, Ph.D., Rachel Handerson, Ph.D. (Aug. 5, 2016). Role of Culture in
Human Evolution.