LL-L "Resources" 2010.08.15 (06) [EN]

Sun Aug 15 21:05:13 UTC 2010

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*L O W L A N D S - L - 15 August 2010 - Volume 06
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From: Marcus Buck <list at marcusbuck.org>

Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2010.08.15 (02) [EN]

From: Roger Thijs, Euro-Support, Inc. <roger.thijs at euro-support.be>

p. 16-18 Jean-Marie Hombert (director of the CNRS and linked to the
university of Lyon) dates, in an interview, the *origin of modern
languages* (with
a complex syntax) *70.000 to 55.000 years ago*, based on the hypothesis that
for crossing sees and oceans a spohisticated level of language is supposed
to be necessary. Distances over see over 100 km needed a developped form of
communication for preparing food for more than 3 days etc.

That's a 'terminus ante quem<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminus_ante_quem>'
(limit before which) not a real dating, isn't it? I would guess that
language is much older than that although the development most likely was
continuous and any "X years ago was the time language became sophisticated"
is rather arbitrary.

According to Wikipedia Mitochondrial
Eve<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve>(that's the latest
individual female
*Homo sapiens* that was the ancestor of all living humans according to
analysis of mitochondrial DNA [which is inherited from the mother without
any relevant interference of male DNA]) lived somewhere between 152,000 and
234,000 BP (before present). So if all recent humans have brains capable to
manage modern language, it's likely that their latest common ancestor had
too. I don't see any reason to doubt that, if they had the mental abilities
necessary to speak, they had language. Babies go from totally empty brains
to waterfalls of words in a few years. If 152,000 BP *Homo sapiens* had the
brain for it, it shouldn't take him long to develop a systematic language. I
mean, it's a fundamental leap of selectional fitness to be able to
coordinate actions. Theoretically it could even have been the reason that
Mitochondrial Eve *became *Mitochondrial Eve.

This is also interesting for proto-linguistics and the search for the
Proto-Human <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language> language
(the most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages). Even
extremely hypothetic proto-languages like
Eurasiatic<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasiatic_languages>do not
reach back more than 15,000 years. Each step further back manifolds
the insecurity. It's extremely unlikely that we will ever reconstruct the
common ancestor, if we need to go back so far.

Another string of thought:
If *Homo sapiens* had the brains 150,000 years ago why did it take him so
long to develop extensive knowledge and why was the development so rapid in
the most recent period? There was no relevant genetic evolution of the brain
since a very long time ago. Well, there are studies that suggest a connection
between brain performance<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence>[measured
as 'intelligence'] and
race <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence>, but even when we
omit the methodological problems (educational penetration, the irrelevance
of 'mathematical logic' as measured in IQ tests to nature-bound people like
the Bushmen of Africa who do the worst performance in IQ tests) and accept a
connection between race and intelligence, then the development of this
"IQ-test-performant" groups still dates back to the times of mitochondrial
haplogroup M <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_M_%28mtDNA%29> (common
ancestor of the "IQ-performant" Europeans and East Asians) which was 60,000
BP. So if we are intelligent since at least 60,000 BP and most likely even
since 150,000 BP, why didn't we develop any relevant civilization before
10,000 BP? It clearly was some kind of social evolution that lead to modern
civilization.

Is curiosity a wholly social phenomenon? Why did nobody invent the wheel
before 6000 BP? A wheel is less useful without streets or draft animals, but
even to a stone-age man living in the flat steppe a pushcart is useful e.g.
to transport his tent, isn't it? Did they have so few belongings that they
could transport it on their backs and carts were just unnecessary?

What about agriculture? It clearly played a big role in the development of
civilization, but why didn't it start earlier? Searching for seeds and
berries is laborious. You don't need much intelligence to realize that it
could be useful to plant some fruit-bearing plants in a single place to have
less work gathering them. Okay, not everybody is so inventive, but in
100,000 years nobody had enough patience to give it a try long enough to
harvest and have success (at which point others will copy and spread the new
technology)?

I can understand the development from the times of agriculture on. As soon
as people cultivate crops they produce food excess. Food excess allows some
people to not produce food and instead produce wares or to work with your
mind (e.g. as a priest, or as a caretaker [e.g. supervising food
production]). At this moment a social hierarchy arises and you get leaders.
Leaders accumulate power and try to increase their power by expanding their
rule over more food-producing people. Other cultures either get subdued by
the foreign leaders or these other cultures adopt the new technologies and
evolve a leadership of its own to fend off the foreign leaders. From this
moment on you have an arms race and inevitably civilization will evolve.

But I do not understand how intelligent humankind managed to exist 100,000
years without igniting the inevitable arms race of technology...

It's notable that the arms race of technology, the begin of agriculture and
the end of the ice age coincide. But I do not see the connection. The end of
the ice age is a very important event with far-reaching consequences
world-wide, but agriculture should have been possible even before. The
agriculturally interesting areas were just in different regions. So how did
the end of the ice age trigger the development of agriculture?

(Is this still on-topic on Lowlands-l? Sorry, if not ;-) )

Marcus Buck

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From: Marcus Buck <list at marcusbuck.org>

Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2010.08.15 (04) [EN]

From: Theo Homan <theohoman at yahoo.com>

 We may consider that water nearly never was a language-border, but
mountain-ridges always were.

Water makes traffic easier while mountains make it harder. That's
understandable. But these language borders are a phenomenon of a time when
the times of "no modern language yet" were eons ago.

Marcus Buck

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