Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> ``The capacity could have been there for a very long time
> before language was in fact invented.'' Carrol
>
> ---------
>
> Yes the physical capacity and its behavioral expression are two
> different questions. But intuitatively, I just don't accept the idea
> of much of a separation. It's hard to believe you can walk around with
> potential you don't use. My underlaying assumption is that life
> is always pushing the envelop so to speak.
Probably we are never going to know the origin of language, & given that probability I think we should hold to the theory (or rather speculation) that is (a) most pleasing and (b) most in concordance with our personal sense of how life works. On that basis I personally opt for the speculation of Ian Tattersall, author of The Monkey in the Mirror and Becoming Human. He assumes that language became established around 40K bp, many 10s of thousands of years after the capacity for language was present. He sees it as an actual invention, and in fact an invention repeated many times before it became established -- and that it was children who invented langauge. He has a further somewhat grim speculation. For 60k or so neanderthals and homo sapiens co-existed. After 40k bp the former disappeared very quickly (a few thousand years). He links the invention of language (or its adaption by adults) to that wiping out of our fellow homo species.
His speculation has one positive basis. He reports on a 'tribe' of monkeys (I forget now which species) who lived along the seaside, and often the food they found on the beach was sandy. Some young very young monkeys began to wash the food morsels in the surf. After some time adult females adopted the practice. Then young males. The Alpha males died while still eating sandy food. This is what suggested to him the possibility that children had invented language on a number of different occasions before it "caught on" with adults.
This fits with my feeling that the prime use of language, and almost certainly the major if not the sole early use of it, was not utilitarian but phatic.
Carrol