[lbo-talk] sordid and legal to boot.....

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Sun Jul 17 16:09:09 PDT 2005


On 7/16/05, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> There must have been a period (perhaps of great duration) subsequent to
> the appearance of _us_, i.e. biologically modern humans, and precedent
> to the invention of language. _That_ would be the interesting period! Is
> it possible to raise practice to the level of conscious theory without
> language? Is it possible to have "sex" in our sense without 'symboling'
> it? Anthropologists & evolutionary biologists have (I think) pushed the
> emergence of modern humans back before 100,000 b.p., but there is little
> or no evidence of symbolic power before about 40,000 b.p.
>

Hmm - I thought there was evidence for symbolic power in many predecessor to our species:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/cavemen/chronology/contentpage4.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/cavemen/chronology/contentpage5.shtml

It seems to be the case that extensive tool use preceded speech - spears, axes, knives, bowls. And since the exact nature of the tools varied from location to location - it meant you had a culture of tool using. That is whatever role biology played in the general fact of tool use (probably extensive) , culture determined the exact nature of the tools. There was no instinctive ability to make a spear or an axe; it was learned behavior. (Not unprecedented; "culture" is far from an exclusively human characteristic; for example large portions of wolf behavior is taught by parents, and not biologically ingrained; having a large portion of species behavior be learned rather than hard-wired inproves ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and thus is one possible survival strategy for a social species.) I can't help but speculate that a pre-verbal culture capable of passing tool making techniques along from generation to generation might also have been capable of passing along cultural tools as well - that mating behavior might well have turned into sex in the human sense. -- Please note: Personal messages should be sent to [garlpublic] followed by the [at] sign with isp of [comcast], then [dot] and then an extension of net



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list