rc-am wrote:
> Rob. . . replied with:
>
> >Language is a universal human attribute for me, yeah. I reckon a human
> >agent is one with the potential to participate in a speech community,
Those who want to identify humanity with language (as well as thought and human social relations with language) will have a tough time accounting for about one-third of human history if current estimates are even roughly accurate. Biologically modern humans go back about 150,000 years; language goes back about 100,000 years, perhaps less, perhaps much less in some parts of the world. (The evidence of this last is that for 10s of thousands of years homo sapiens and homo neanderthal coexisted in some parts of the world, and then very suddenly the latter disappeared, but not at the same rate every place. The hypothesis is that as humans achieved language they became more efficient destroyers of close cousins.)
Any how, were humans not human for 50 thousand years? This is a puzzle I shouod think for a number of schools of thought, but particularly for most versions of "humanism."
Carrol