JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>
>
> >Language/symbolling enhances sociality tremendously. Was language/symbolling
> >invented in the mother-child relationship ? i.e., did women invent
> >language/symbolling ?
>
> Has anyone tried to put together an argument for this claim? I'd be
> interested in seeing it.
First of all, language (or the invention of language) does not enter into any discussion of biological evolution, because biologically modern humans (i.e., humans whose biological development had ceased) preceded by some more or less long period the 'invention' of language. (I keep coming across quite different estimates of how far back _homo sapiens_ goes. But 100,000 years is one estimate one often finds. One very prominent anthropologist suggests that language did not appear until about 40,000 BP. (See Ian Tattersall, _The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human_ [2002] and _Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness_ [1998]). He speculates that _children_ invented languages, and speculates further that they did so several times before adults 'caught on.' He has some interesting material on a monkey 'tribe' in which the young monkeys began to wash the beach sand off their food, the practice then being adopted by older females, but _never_ adopted by the older males.
>From what I've gathered from various writings I've come across, a good
deal of what we think of as distinctively human lies in traits which are
spandrels -- i.e. traits which had no practical use when they first
evolved (and hence were not subject to adaptation) but which simply were
'by-blows' of other traits which did have adaptive worth.
ALSO. See Oliver Sacks in a recent NLRB. It has been pretty well established by recent studies of brain-damaged patients that complex thought is possible (and occurs) in those who cannot understand, create, or think in words. Further, mathematical ability is sharply separated from language. It would, that is, have been quite possible for humans to flourish for 10s of thousands of years without language. Language ability is almost certainly a spandrel. Also, we simply don't know how far back 'symbolling' goes; there is no evidence for it before about 40,000 BP, but there is no evidence against it either.
Carrol
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