The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

Then, beginning around 1.8 million years ago, some hominids in East Africa began making new and more finely crafted tools, known as the Acheulean tool kit.61 The main tool was a teardrop-shaped hand axe, and its symmetry and careful crafting jump out at us as something new under the sun, something made by minds like ours (see figure 9.2). This seems like a promising place to start talking about cumulative culture. But here’s the weird thing: Acheulean tools are nearly identical everywhere, from Africa to Europe to Asia, for more than a million years. There’s hardly any variation, which suggests that the knowledge of how to make these tools may not have been passed on culturally. Rather, the knowledge of how to make these tools may have become innate, just as the “knowledge” of how to build a dam is innate in beavers.