Nature is reporting the discovery of Acheulean "hand axe" tools dating back to 1.76 million years ago, making them the oldest known examples of such tools. Even more exciting, they were found in the company of Oldowan flake tools, suggesting that these newfound tools are part of the transition from one technology to the other. Oldowan tools had been around for about a million years by then.
The New York Times story seems good and the Associated Press account is impressively enthusiastic.
In my book I go for round numbers and date the first word at 1.8 million years, so I'm glad to see some confirmation of creative activity from (roughly) that period.
Dancing (movement with sound) is universal in human cultures, but the form it takes is not.
There is an argument to made against the proposition that language exists, or at least exists in the sense of being something that can be studied. It says that individual languages can be studied, and abstract generalizations can be made, but those generalizations don’t have predictive power about any particular language. They cannot because each language has its own constelation of unpredictable properties..
I'm focused on my book right now and am letting the blog version of Babel's Dawn slide a bit, but I've made another video about the book, which you are welcome to watch.
When is a book not a book? When, like Babel's Dawn, it's a tour of a natural history museum!. Bart de Boer, the Dutch scholar on prehistoric and evolutionary phonology, describes Babel's Dawn as "quite literally a tour through the imaginary museum of language evolution."
Einstein in his favorite hat. Einstein disagreed with Chomsky over how symbols work.
Sixty minutes into his Cologne lecture, Chomsky discusses the elementary unit of meaningful language. What is it? He says the standard answer is "comes from the referentialist doctrine." Tiger refers to a tiger. Chomsky surprised me by saying that this idea seems to be true for animals. A vervet monkey, for example, makes different calls in response to specific stimuli. Chomsky doesn't specify, but vervets are famous for making different calls in response to snakes, leopards, and eagles. (I don't know if referentialist doctrine really works when it comes to lion roars, wolf howls, zebra barks, etc.) But, says Chomsky, the referential doctrine does not "seem to be remotely true for the simplest elements of human language."
I've made another video presentation about my book. This one is an answer to skeptics who might react to the title by doubting that there is anything to say about speech origins. For those who prefer to read, the video transcript is below. If you are having trouble with the embedded version, you can find the YouTube video here.
PNAS has just published a paper on Spontaneous Prosocial Chooice by Chimpanzees. It is a little off topic for this blog but the role of cooperation in the evolutiion of language is so central to this blog that I want to bring my readers' attention to anything that challengnes the thesis. Although, really it does noto challenge the position that sharing knowledge is basic to humans, rare amongst chimps.
The paper describes experiments in which the chimpanzees prefer behavior that gives themselves and a fellow chimpanzee a reward over behavior in which the actor alone receives an award. This shows a sympathy and "common decency" that has sometimes been denied. But it doesn't really address the issue of cooperation in which two or more individuals work together toward a common goal, at some risk or cost to the participants. The behavior show here carries no cost.. Still, it is not nothing.
Our universe is said to have begun in a big bang. Might language have begun the same way.\?
In his lecture to the University of Cologne, Noam Chomsky gives language's start a window of from 50 to 100 thousand years ago. I think that is absurdly late, but part of that difference may reflect a different conception of language. On this blog, the essence of language is its ability to permit a social examination of some topic, but for Chomsky the most elementary property is that it is unbounded. In his lecture he says that any approach to language that doesn't at least capture this property cannot be taken seriously. [26:50 minutes into lecture]. "Unbounded" is not the same as infinite. Faulkner, in Absalom! Absalom! has a sentence that goes on for over 700 words. Proust has one that goes one for over 900. Once, as an exercise, I composed a sentence that was 100 words long and probably I could have made it 101 words.
Recent Comments