Prehistory and learning

It is clear that the brain is an evolved organ with evolved cognitive features such as sensory apparatus and the structure and process of memory. The brain is not, as Locke thought, a tabula rasa, but an active organ structured to learn.

This organ evolved to such a degree that it could ‘learn’. How we learn, the essential process of relatively permanent encoding, storage and recall from long-term memory, is a set of evolved capabilities.

The capabilities and limitations of our ability to learn also inform how we should teach. This includes the recognition that we have limited working memories, fallible long-term memories and that we forget almost everything we attempt to learn (Ebbinghaus 1885). We need around eight hours of sleep a day (less impairs learning), are emotionally unstable, full of in-built biases and lack the ability to pay pure attention for long periods at a time. We can’t download from or network with other brains, making teaching and learning a slow process of often cumbersome communication. Then we decline in terms of memory, sometimes into dementia and inevitably death.

Our cognitive capabilities and the teaching and learning that undoubtedly took place fade off into millions of years into our ancestral species. In that period, the ability to learn was clearly an important factor in survival, sexual selection and therefore evolutionary advantage. This is not a linear, even dendritic structure but a network of progression with species evolving, disappearing and interbreeding.

There is also a long history of teaching and learning in prehistory. The evidence is clear, physically in sites where stone tools were made, with signs of worked and discarded tools used to learn the craft. Teaching and learning existed for a far longer period before writing, which has become our definition of history and prehistory. We see tool production develop in sophistication, more varied and effective across a wider range of uses.

Prehistory shows that learning was key to the success of our species, especially when we became language speakers, where we could recall, plan ahead, create tools and technology. The first evidence of us externalising our ideas from our ancestral species is on shells around 500,000 years ago. But it is from 70,000 years ago that the cognitive revolution appeared, evidenced by the astounding appearance of cave paintings. There is some evidence that proto-writing appeared on some of these drawings at around 20,000 years ago.

We also invented the technology of fire, the ability to create and nurture a fire, which meant extending our social lives into the hours of darkness, larger social groups, eating cooked food leading to larger brains and protecting us from predators. It also allowed us to move into colder climes.

I argue in Learning Technologies (Clark 2023) that learning technologies from language onwards but also fire, have a generative effect that accelerates social and cultural success, and allows us to create further cultural capital, tools and technologies. Learning technologies generate cultural archiving and this furthers learning from the past and therefore progress into imagined and planned futures.

It is clear that in hunter gatherer societies, teaching and learning was practiced. The evidence of cave drawings that come after the cognitive revolution in Homo sapiens is clear. Their illustrative and instructional use and function is clear, as opportunities for these nomadic people to gather socially and learn about they prey and predators (Clark 2022).

Teaching and learning have been, for most of our history oral, learning within the family or larger social group, skills that were necessary in the practical world of hunter-gatherer survival and later settled communities where agriculture necessitates a more structured form of learning around planning, crops and produce. More formal reflections on teaching and learning therefore come from the invention of agriculture in the Middle East, at around 10,000 BCE. Agriculture creates the need for writing so gives rise to writing, as a way of accounting for land ownership, quantifying crops, trade and contracts. Towns and cities emerge on the back of crop surpluses, which create more hierarchical structures and the need for written laws and control by emerging elites.

The rise of settled communities and eventually to the formation of the world's first cities and states in Mesopotamia. With these communities, the need for more complex administrative systems arose around writing as accounting for the production, trade and distribution of food and goods, and with it the need for education and the establishment of more formalized systems of teaching and learning. It also led to accounting for our supposed souls and sins. Practiced religions became religions of the book.