PIE vs. Proto-Language

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/13/99 6:16:18 PM, Georg at home.ivm.de wrote:

<<Palaeontologists a/o archaeologists should be looking for signs of
early culture,...to approach the time where it would simply be necessary to
assume that people who did this and that or used this and that, or cooperated
in this and that way could not well have none so without considerably
elaborate communication skills. Having the brains is only a prerequesite for
this.>>

Let me just posit a slightly different scenario.  That the first change that
happened that moved early primates towards homo was the ability to make
complex sounds.  One of the core understandings of evolutionary theory is
that all adaptation is local and limited in time.
So this adaption would have had a very local and limited advantage - say, in
the ability to hunt communally or to signal with precision where food or
danger was on an ad hoc basis.

But with the ability to make more complex sounds would have come a number of
additional features that became more long term.  The most critical of these
would have been the ability to pass on acquired traits and knowledge from
generation to generation in an efficient form - verbally.  Human communalism
would have immediately become a more powerful tool for survival with the
addition of language.  Dogs and Japanese monkeys pass on non-genetic
knowledge from generation to generation - but they must do it by
demonstration.  Language permits the passing on of information without
demonstration - symbolically.  I can describe to you a hand-axe and how it
works without ever showing you one.  And you might be able to make one from
description alone.

Language therefore creates a cultural knowledge storage system that is
cumulative.  It keeps expanding.  Which would make a culture favor
individuals (among others) who could retain more of that accumulated
knowledge - it would favor larger harddrives, so to speak.  (There is an
analogy between the old 10meg harddrives and the 8gig drives becoming
standard today.)  And this would favor the development of bigger, if not more
specialized brains to store that accumulated information.

The pattern would be:
- communal action favors more complex signaling capability (speech)
- speech favors multi-generational communal information accrual
- continuing communal information accrual favors larger brains
- larger brains favor larger pools of communal knowledge (cultural
complexity) and so forth

In this view, early language becomes the enhanced vehicle for preserving
knowledge from one generation to another - human culture -(so that it does
not have to be relearned each new generation) and even accumulated.  And
EVENTUALLY accounts for increased brain size.  Language > human culture >
bigger brain.

Where would this date human language (in the big broad sense, not as a
language system)?  I received a post awhile back that pointed out that
handaxes date as far back possibly as 700,000 years ago.  And that the
quality and refinement of those handaxes steadily increase over time.  And
that there is no case in the animal kingdom where that kind of
generation-to-generation improvement has ever been evidenced.  Could those
handaxes have been improved by generation-to-generation demonstration?
Possibly.  But there are just no examples of demonstration alone being able
to keep information passing on for very long, much less while improvements
are also being made.  And so there is at least an argument that such steady,
cumulative technical improvement could not have been accomplished without
language.  A similar case can be made for the communal use of fire.

That would date the earliest forms of human language as early as 700,000
years ago.  Really not that long ago, when you consider how much knowledge
one would personally have to accumulate to say travel to the moon, make an
atom bomb or write new National Enquirer cover headlines every week.

Not arguing for this point of view.  Just offering it as a different POV.
One that connects our evolution intricately with language.  Not suddenly big
or specialized brains.  Not some extraordinary cerebral event.

But just the ability to make sounds complex enough so that information  could
be stored in those sounds (or written words) and passed on in that form from
generation to generation in the cumulative way that is so singularly
characteristic of human culture.

PS - Just saw who A&E's Biography picked as the number one (out of 100) most
influential person of the last Millennium, over Copernicus, Newton, Adam
Smith, Shakespeare, Pasteur, DaVinci, etc.

Gutenberg.

Regards,
Steve Long