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At some point between stone crashing on stone and the murmur of words by a Paleolithic fire, something shifted. In a brand new study, a multidisciplinary group of researchers has mapped the deep prehistory of human cultural transmission — not only what our forebears created, but how they instructed one another to do so. What they found was a gradual, transformative transition: from passive imitation to formal instruction, with language and purpose as the bridges of what came to be civilization. Published in PLoS One, the researchers include cognitive archaeologist Ivan Colagè (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross) and paleoanthropologist Francesco d'Errico (University of Bordeaux), who describe this transformation taking place over 3.3 million years, the same span that saw