How playing the piano is linked to 1.7-million-year-old technological breakthrough

About 1.75 million years ago, an early form of human made a stunning technological breakthrough, ushering in the prehistoric equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and possibly the evolution of the species into Homo sapiens.

After 800,000 years of using pebbles and simple flakes of stone as tools, some bright hominins discovered how to make more complicated ‘hand-axes’ and the new invention quickly spread across the world, from southern Africa to Europe and China.

Now scientists have discovered, using a process known as ‘neuroarchaeology’, that they probably did so using the same areas of the brain that are used to play the piano today.

And that, the researchers said, is thought to have marked “a turning point in the evolution of the human brain”.

Professor John Spencer, of the University of East Anglia, who took part in the study, said: “It is fascinating that these same brain networks today allow modern humans to perform such behaviours as skilfully playing a musical instrument.”

A paper in the journal Nature Human Behaviour described how the scientists monitored the brains of a group of people as they were taught how to make simple flakes of stone and then shape more complex axe-heads.

They theorised that modern Homo sapiens’ brains would react in a similar way to that of some of our early ancestors.

The simple ‘Oldowan’ tools required co-ordination of areas of the brain involved in visual attention and motor control.

But making the more complex ‘Acheulian’ tools saw the integration of areas involved in visual working memory, auditory and sensorimotor information, and complex action-planning. These are the same ones that activate when people play the piano.

It is not thought that early humans were able to speak language as we do, although they would have had communication skills that allowed them to hunt effectively in packs with their deadly stone axes.

Professor Spencer said it was possible that the more sophisticated tool-making brain allowed early humans to develop language and music.

But the 1.7 million-year-old humans may have been capable of making music of some kind, he added, although "certainly not Mozart", he added.

Dr Shelby Putt, of the Stone Age Institute in Indiana, who led the study, said it had revealed “key brain networks that might underlie the shift towards more human-like intelligence around 1.75 million years ago”.

“We think this marked a turning point in the evolution of the human brain, leading to the evolution of a new species of human,” she said.

Making an Oldowan flaked stone tool involved a series of strikes with a knapping stone in the hope of producing one sharp enough to be useful.

But Acheulian tools required the maker to carefully shape the edge of the axe. This involved “the execution of a skilled striking platform set-up to plan the direction, shape and size of a series of flakes that will effectively thin and shape the piece”, the paper said.

And this more complex task required different parts of the brain to work together.

“Notably, this cognitive network is nearly identical to one that is active when trained pianists play the piano,” the researchers wrote.

“The relatively weak Oldowan activation in this network is also informative. In the Oldowan task, each strike is an independent event that attempts to create a flake with a sharp edge; there is little need to actively hold a long chain of actions in mind to meet the overarching goal of the task.”

The researchers made clear the significance of the change both in terms of the capabilities of the new tool and as a sign that early humans had become a more intelligent animal.

“The addition of these multi-purpose tools to the hominin toolkit enabled the exploitation of a wider variety of energy-dense food items through functions such as butchery, woodworking and digging,” the researchers wrote.

“The differences in technological complexity between these two tool types could be indicative of a shift in cognition and language abilities from a more ape-like to a human-like state.”