You write:
>CB: But there wouldn't be artifacts of speaking so the language could go
>back before 100,000 years. Sahlins says there was culture a million years
>ago, and culture is symboling. If you can symbol , you can speak. Language
>is a form of symbolling.
With you in most respects, but I was watching a docco the other day (a very interesting three parter called something very like 'The Journey of Humanity') which points out we hadn't actually developed the infrastructure necessary for speech until Homo Sapien came along mebbe 150 000 years ago. They can tell this, because (and I never knew this) a couple of very small bones (near where throat meets jaw) are necessary, and of course bones can survive 150 000 years. Homo Ergasta didn't have 'em, and, I guess we can assume the Neanderthal people didn't have 'em either, else the programme, which talked a lot about their living together in Europe and the Middle East (even copulating, if the mortal bit-o'this-bit-o'that remains of one poor four-year-old lass don't lie), would've made a point of it. But, yeah, we were symbol-using creatures long before we were homo sapien - it's there in the burial practices, for a start.
PS I also learned that a volcanic event (originating somewhere in SE Asia, if memory serves - but pretty well devastating the whole planet for a century or two) about 75000 years ago apparently reduced our numbers to about - wait for it - one thousand! Considering we covered most of Europe, Africa and half of Asia by then - that would have meant we all come from extremely small bands of survivors.
I reckon (and the show had nothing to say about this at all) there's a promising theory of appearance differentiation to be had out of this. What we now call 'racial' difference could conceivably be a product of the enhanced evolutionary variation that would follow reproduction within these very isolated little bands - all in very different physical settings, all already in very different cultural contexts, and all dependent on very small, sorta standardised, gene pools. And all only 75 000 years ago! That theory (and it's probably a heap of fanciful bollocks on the part of a tired bloke who just can't concentrate on telecommunications policy) allows that we were all of one 'race' 75000 years ago, and that the colour of the skin was probably still the colour of the skin of those who turned right instead of left at the Rift Valley turn-off less than forty thousand years before that.
Waddyareckon?
Cheers, Rob.