2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Cognitive processes in the brain involved in playing musical instruments, and not the development of language abilities, helped our ancestors to make a breakthrough in the creation of tools of labor. An article about this was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
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About 1, 75 million years ago, there was a transition from the tools of the Olduvai culture - made from fragments of stone and rather simple, to more complex tools of the Acheulean culture, adapted for butchering carcasses - knives and hand axes. Previously, it was believed that such a transition was due to the development of the culture of language and thinking of ancient people.
Anthropologists and psychologists from Great Britain and the United States conducted an experiment and determined what changes in the brain of primitive people had to occur in order for the tools they made to take on a new form. The experiment involved 31 people who were trained to make flint tools. Scientists gave 15 of them to watch a video with explanations on how to make stone tools, the other half of the subjects watched the video without explanation. After that, people had to make a tool from stone by chipping flint, while researchers monitored their brain activity using near-infrared scanning.
As a result of the experiment, it was found that simple tools related to the Olduvai culture can be made according to instructions from silent videos. During their manufacture, only the areas of the brain associated with visual attention and motor skills were active.
But to create more complex adaptations of the Acheulean culture, it took instruction “with words” and the activation during execution of other areas - visual memory, perception and processing of information by ear, structures responsible for repetition and planning of actions.
“The fact that these more advanced forms of cognitive activity were necessary to create Acheulean axes, rather than simple choppers, means that this type can be carried over 1.8 million years ago, to homo erectus, when the first such tools. Amazingly, these same areas of the brain are activated, for example, when you play the piano,”says co-author Shelby Putt of the University of Iowa.
Ekaterina Zaikina
