Threshold 6 · Collective learning
Collective Learning
One lineage of primates learns to make tools, control fire, speak, and pass knowledge on, and becomes the first species whose knowledge accumulates.
Every species learns. Only one stores what it learns outside its own bodies, in words, tools and traditions, and hands it on so that each generation starts where the last one finished. That trick, collective learning, is the threshold that makes human history different in kind from the history of any other animal.
This chapter traces the lineage that crossed it: the primates, the hominins, the toolmakers, the fire keepers, and finally our own species, which appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago and spread across every continent, including early routes into India.
It ends with people living as foragers, the way our species lived for most of its existence, on the eve of an experiment that would change everything: farming.
Lessons
- 6.1 Primates and homininsDraft
Where we branch off, and why standing up came before big brains.
- 6.2 From habilis to sapiensDraft
How many kinds of human there were, and why only one is left.
- 6.3 Fire, tools and cookingDraft
How an outside stomach paid for an expensive brain.
- 6.4 Language and symbolic thoughtDraft
The one thing that leaves no fossils, and how we look for it anyway.
- 6.5 Collective learningDraft
The threshold: why a species that forgets nothing beats a species that thinks faster.
- 6.6 Out of Africa, into IndiaDraft
How our species spread across the world, and what the genetics of the subcontinent actually show.
- 6.7 Foraging lifewaysDraft
How people lived for ninety-five percent of human history, and why we keep getting it wrong.