News Finding: Stout found that his students' white matter--or the neural connectivity in their brains--increased as they gained competence in flintknapping.
Paper Finding: ).
News Context: Somewhere on the timeline between the long run of the Oldowan and the more rapid rise of Acheulean technologies, language (or what's often called protolanguage) likely made its first appearance. Stout found that his students' white matter--or the neural connectivity in their brains--increased as they gained competence in flintknapping. His research suggests that producing complex tools spurred an increase in brain size and other aspects of hominin evolution, including--perhaps--the emergence of language.
Paper Context: The tool-making pedagogy hypothesis of language origin fits naturally with the view of language as a skill (e.g. ). The presumably innate foundation over which the specifically linguistic skills are built during ontogeny, the ease with which humans combine communicative influence and reference with complex sequential hierarchical structuring of actions, may be considered an 'evolutionary fossil' of the social skill-transmission context in which the two components of this combination first came together.