That's just all kinds of interesting.
In a recent paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves.
Oren Kolodny and his co-author, Shimon Edelman, a professor of psychology at Cornell University... theorize the emergence of language was predicated on our ancestors’ ability to perform sequence-dependent processes, including the production of complex tools. Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory University, found that his students’ white matter—or the neural connectivity in their brains—increased as they gained competence in flintknapping. His research suggests that producing complex tools spurred an increase in brain size and other aspects of hominin evolution, including—perhaps—the emergence of language.
Teaching, Kolodny says, was a crucial part of the process. When hominins like Homo ergaster and Homo erectus taught their close relatives how to make complex tools, they worked their way into an ever more specialized cultural niche, with evolutionary advantage going to those individuals who were not only adept at making and using complex tools, but who were also able—at the same time—to communicate in more and more sophisticated ways.
Many species of ape use tools in sequence-dependent ways and also have highly developed levels of communication. But the order in which those apes produce their utterances doesn’t make much difference to their meaning, Kolodny explains. “The question becomes not ‘How did language arise only in humans?’ but ‘Why did it not arise in other apes as well?’ And the answer is, the qualitative difference between us and other apes is they don’t have the communication system coupled to those temporal sequencing structural capabilities.” Rudimentary language, which evolved in the context of toolmaking and teaching, was ultimately able to break away from its immediate contexts—this is the hijacking part—eventually employing those original cognitive pathways for its own unique purposes.
And of course there are skeptics, though, from this extremely brief description I find it utterly bizarre :
A surprise came in 2014, when Chomsky, Robert Berwick, and other titans in the field weighed in substantively on the topic of evolution for the first time, arguing in a series of jaw-dropping papers that language basically did show up on the scene like a fully formed Athena, syntax-driven shield in hand. “The language faculty is an extremely recent acquisition in our lineage,” these authors wrote, “and it was acquired not in the context of slow, gradual modification of preexisting systems under natural selection but in a single, rapid, emergent event.”
Berwick, a professor of computational linguistics at MIT and the co-author with Chomsky of Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, sees little merit in the stone-tool-based theories proposed by researchers like Stout and Kolodny. “The Stout business doesn’t work,” Berwick wrote to me in an email. “The experimental findings show that, to the contrary, verbal language DOES NOT FACILITATE toolmaking.” Berwick calls the purported connection between toolmaking and language a useful metaphor, at best.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/toolmaking-language-brain/562385/
I find it intriguing that spoken language appears to have been developed or at least employed by the early makers of tools. From my own observations, it appears common for people who are dyslexic to rely on memorization of speech and to enjoy developing their seemingly innate skills to create complex objects. This is in contrast to traders and accountants who rely on written records of transactions. This difference in favored communication methods has spanned many generations. Was dance used for communication at the times when some animals were being domesticated? If so, perhaps the developments of humanity worthy of distinction are dancing-human, sculpting-human, singing-human, and writing-human. Others that probably merit inclusion in this categorization are drumming-human and painting-human. The variants that may unite all of these archetypes are wondering-human, laughing-human, and crying-human. Perhaps it is the capacity to develop and appreciate the arts that defines what it is to be human.
ReplyDeleteThere was a nice documentary about that some time back. "The day we learned to think", I believe it was called. Probably BBC but I'm not sure.
ReplyDeleteWell that is interesting.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought that early humans used hand gestures before they developed articulate speech. That's why we still talk with our hands.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a famous saying by Karl Marx: Labour made humans out of apes.
ReplyDeleteThe famous meta-saying of a blind pig applies, of course.
Brian Fitzgerald : Well, it depends on how you define dance. Humans have been hunting, with some success, as semi-organised herds for at least a million years, which predates any languages with grammar as we know it by about a million years. And humans have been making increasingly recognisable tools for extracting meat out of pre-hunted creatures for almost two million years. Some people might, not entirely unreasonably, argue that both stone-knapping and herd pursuit are, among the other things they are, exercises in choreography.
ReplyDelete