Teaching as Coordination: New View on Human Cultural Evolution

In a perspective article published in Frontiers in Education, researchers Paulo Barraza and Igor Parra propose a fundamental reframing of how cumulative culture emerged in human evolution. Rather than viewing cultural transmission as the high-fidelity copying of information or mental representations, the authors argue that culture persists through recurrent forms of interpersonal coordination. This perspective shifts the focus of evolutionary studies from the accuracy of knowledge transfer to the relational dynamics that allow social practices to be re-enacted across generations. The study identifies teaching not as a simple transfer of data, but as a historically specialized organization of coordination that stabilizes viable patterns of participation.

The authors base their argument on the Biology of Cognition and enactive traditions, which view cognition not as a computational device solving problems via representations, but as a history of structural coupling between organisms and their environments. From this standpoint, what is passed from one generation to the next is not a static collection of representations, but a dynamic history of coordinated behavior. This theoretical shift suggests that the transition from biological to cultural evolution was defined not merely by the appearance of technology, but by the emergence of new kinds of interpersonal coordination that made technological practices historically reproducible.

Archaeological evidence supports the notion that technological traditions have accumulated over evolutionary time, a process distinct from the sporadic tool use seen in non-human species. The earliest Oldowan industries, dating from 3.2 to 2.6 million years ago, exhibit recurrent production patterns and systematic core reduction methods reproduced across individuals and populations. Later, the Acheulean tradition introduced significant standardization and symmetry, with handaxes following design rules used across large areas for over a million years. Such temporal stability is unlikely to be accounted for by repeated individual rediscovery, suggesting instead that standardized behaviors were preserved through recurrent social practices beyond the individual lifespan.

Traditional explanations for this stability often invoke social learning, imitation, or shared intentionality. However, the authors argue that these mechanisms do not fully resolve the question of what interpersonal organization enables a community to conserve a way of acting across generations while allowing for innovation. They propose that the missing mechanism was the historical specialization of coordination into teaching. In this view, teaching is a relational process where individuals set up recurrent coordination of action, allowing novices to participate in historically established domains of practice. This process involves asymmetric yet complementary roles, explicit orientation toward guiding the learner, normative co-regulation through real-time demonstration and correction, and the progressive transformation of the learner’s participation.

The concept of “cumulative coordination” replaces the traditional idea of cumulative culture as the step-by-step accumulation of knowledge. Technologies accumulate not because knowledge is transferred with high-fidelity copying, but because communities preserve methods of acting through a process of conservation-through-transformation. Coordination is kept on-target through the interplay of material constraints, such as the physical laws of stone and biomechanics, and normative, real-time interactive adjustments. This restricts the viable phase space of action, ensuring that practices remain stable enough for continuity while remaining flexible enough to produce new possibilities for action under changing ecological and social conditions.

Technological artifacts, such as handaxes, are reinterpreted in this framework not as repositories of stored information, but as material evidence of repeated patterns of living and coordinating actions together. Morphological continuity in these artifacts does not imply that an identical mental template was passed on across generations. Instead, it provides archaeological evidence that a particular organization of technological activity was sufficiently constrained and recurrent to repeatedly generate recognizable material regularities over geological timescales. The stability of these traditions reflects the conservation of relational organizations rather than the transmission of invariant information.

The authors propose a multilevel neurodynamic hypothesis to test these ideas empirically. If teaching is the progressive constitution of a shared domain of action, its defining processes cannot be fully understood by studying isolated brains. The relevant unit of analysis is the dynamic interaction between teacher and learner. Hyperscanning methods, which record the simultaneous brain activity of interacting individuals, offer a non-reductive empirical window onto these dynamics. Research in social interaction and educational neuroscience has shown that successful cooperation and effective teaching are characterized by behavioral synchronization, temporal alignment of actions, and interbrain synchronization.

Interbrain coupling is not interpreted as a direct index of a shared mental state or proof of identical representations in two brains. Rather, it reflects the continuous mutual adaptation by which participants maintain a shared history of action. Different frequency bands of neural activity may index distinct facets of interaction; for instance, lower-frequency theta-band coupling may reflect common motor execution, while higher-frequency gamma-band synchrony may operate as a marker of shared intentionality. Recent research demonstrates a causal relationship between interbrain coupling and coordinated behavioral outcomes, suggesting that neural alignment is an active constituent of the distributed sensorimotor loop.

This framework leads to specific empirical predictions. The stability of teaching interactions should depend more on measures of interpersonal coordination than on individual cognitive performance alone. The successful acquisition of complex practices should be linked to the gradual development of stable patterns of behavioral and neural alignment between teacher and learner. Furthermore, these relational dynamics should be able to predict learning outcomes without relying on conventional measures of information transfer or individual ability. The classroom is thus viewed as a laboratory where fundamental evolutionary innovations in human coordination are still unfolding.

The perspective challenges the notion that the primary evolutionary breakthrough was the creation of sophisticated tools. Instead, it highlights the capacity to establish relational conditions whereby specific ways of acting could persist beyond the individuals who first devised them. Technologies survive across generations because communities continually reconstruct the consensual coordination that enables those objects to have meaning and function. This historical specialization of social processes allowed for the maintenance, transformation, and extension of collective practices over geological timescales.

From this enactive neurodynamic approach, social cognition is not bounded within individual brains but emerges from dynamic, multilevel interactions between brains, bodies, and material environments. Studying teaching through this lens provides insight into the relational dynamics that made cumulative culture possible. Stone tools and technological traditions are the material regularities of a deeper evolutionary transformation: the historical stabilization of organisms capable of organizing their actions with others across generations.

Ultimately, the authors suggest that the most remarkable achievement of Homo sapiens may not have been the ability to fabricate better tools, but the capacity to generate and conserve forms of interpersonal coordination. These relational dynamics enabled tools and the shared worlds of meaning associated with them to continue existing long after the people who made them were no longer there. This view positions interbrain coupling as a functional component of an organism-organism coordination process, offering a novel approach to understanding the evolutionary origins of cumulative culture.

Subject of Research: The role of interpersonal coordination and teaching in the evolutionary origins of cumulative culture

Article Title: The evolution of shared worlds: teaching and the origins of cumulative culture

Article References: Barraza, P., & Parra, I. (2026). The evolution of shared worlds: teaching and the origins of cumulative culture. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1977228. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1977228

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1977228

Keywords: cumulative culture, human evolution, teaching, interpersonal coordination, enactive cognition, neurodynamics, cultural transmission, hyperscanning, archaeology, social learning, evolution, shared