Neuroplasticity enables bio-cultural feedback in Paleolithic stone-tool making.

ABSTRACT: Stone-tool making is an ancient human skill thought to have played a key role in the bio-cultural co-evolutionary feedback that produced modern brains, culture, and cognition. To test the proposed evolutionary mechanisms underpinning this hypothesis we studied stone-tool making skill learning in modern participants and examined interactions between individual neurostructural differences, plastic accommodation, and culturally transmitted behavior. We found that prior experience with other culturally transmitted craft skills increased both initial stone tool-making performance and subsequent neuroplastic training effects in a frontoparietal white matter pathway associated with action control. These effects were mediated by the effect of experience on pre-training variation in a frontotempora

SUBMITTER: Hecht EE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9938911 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature