Stone Age Humans Needed More Brain Power to Make Big Leap in Tool Design

[Mark P. Line]

I doubt that anything interesting can be said about narrowly
language-related cognitive abilities being somehow related (in some
speakers, at some times) to particular non-linguistic cognitive abilities
such as those underlying flintknapping.

It would be very much more interesting to find this or that cognitive
ability that can be shown to be utterly and necessarily divorced from
language.


Just as an aside: My suspicion of evolutionary "leaps" is directly and
exponentially proportional to the length of time since that leap is
supposed to have occurred.

-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Bartlesville, OK


jess tauber wrote:
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101103171451.htm
>
> So cutting-edge technology really was cutting edge technology? Anyone here
> care to comment about possible links to language? It is well known that
> flint knapping requires the capacity to associate the brightness or
> dullness of sounds produced during test-tapping, at different positions,
> of the knapping material with likelihood of conchoidal fracture and
> material texture- hit the stone the wrong way, at the wrong position, or
> with the wrong tool and you're out of business. Something perhaps akin to
> sound symbolism? Or 'bipartite constructions' with instrument/bodypart and
> pathway/position affixes and similarly organized longer ideophones? Other
> developed technologies probably also require the same sorts of knowledge,
> though with softer, wetter materials (that don't leave fossils).
>
> Jess Tauber
>
>


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Bartlesville, OK