Dr. Bradford Andrews, Anthropology Program Director, Speaks at Tokyo University in Japan

Dr. Bradford Andrews, Director of the Anthropology Program, gave an invited talk for seminar at Tokyo University (Todai) in Japan titled, “Making Stone Tools: Implications for the Evolution of Human Cognition.” This talk included a lecture and a stone tool production demonstration. Taught by a colleague of Dr. Andrews at Todai (Dr. Candler Hallman), this particular course is a graduate-level seminar titled ‘How Culture Works: Experience in Body and Mind.” It covers various related topics, this one being the relationship between brain expansion and the development of stone tool technology in human evolution. It was this relationship of mutual feedback that led to the emergence of human language, something required for teaching tool production. Obviously human language as an integral component of our behavior, something arguably unique to our species, provided humanity with an adaptive evolutionary advantage that we have exploited with great “success.”