Language Evolution

Mr Rodgers meets Koko the sign language using gorilla on his TV special about accepting people with differences…

There were just two more plenary speakers at the end of the conference and both delivered fascinating and controversial presentations.

The archaeological positions on language evolution are complicated and frequently bitter. Archaeologists are reluctant to speculate on anything that doesn’t fossilise and the emergence of language is embedded into several, broader debates about how humans emerged. Firstly there is a debate about how late or early modern human behaviour emerged. Secondly a debate about when anatomically modern humans emerged, and finally a debate over the geographical pattern of emergence of modern humans (both behaviourally and biologically).

Continue reading ‘Evolang Post #5 - d’Errico and Bickerton’

I’ve had a few emails recently asking about this clip that has been doing the rounds on youtube.

I’m pretty dubious that it represents an elephant truly drawing an abstract image of itself as some sort of therapy. None-the-less it remains fascinating.

Continue reading ‘Elephants Painting?’

Anthropology.net and New Scientist have recently reported on a couple of developments in the Neanderthal language debate.
Firstly, a new paper is in the works that will cast doubt upon the conclusions of the now famous Neanderthal FOXP2 paper from last year. Krause et al found the same adaptive variation of the language-implicated FOXP2 gene as is found in humans in Neanderthal DNA sequences, and claimed that the this was evidence for FOXP2 as a homologous trait that was present in our common ancestor. Cue endless headlines about how this finding is proof that Neanderthals had language.

Continue reading ‘Hear a Neanderthal Talk (and Other Interesting Neanderthal Language Rumblings)’

A lovely clip of Orangutans both tool using and navigating their arboreal environment, from a BBC wildlife documentary.

After this one, there’s two more posts to come on Evolang, where firstly I’ll sum up the remaining plenary speakers, and then sum up the more interesting speakers from the normal sessions. Apologies for the slow posting but ‘tis essay season and I’ve loads of work to do.

As far as Evolang goes I must confess that beer and tapas had diminished my note-taking skills at this point and so some of these sketches might be a little vague, but I’ll try to be as fair and accurate as I can be.

Simon Kirby presented a kind of ‘greatest hits’ of the work being carried out at the LEC in Edinburgh. I better restate my biases in the interests of disclosure. I am one of the vast crowd of ‘Edinburghians’ who made up the largest group at Evolang, but I hope this won’t distort my reporting of their or other people’s ideas.

Continue reading ‘Evolang Post #4′

This nice little paper from Science (Vol 319, 2008 ) presents evidence that languages undergo an initial period of strong seperation, where the rate of change is high, and then slow down into a steadier pace of change. They hypothesise that this is due to a cultural need to establish a seperate identity, or as a product of the way we use language to enhance group cohesion in times of cultural upheaval. A nice hypothesis that, if true, would demonstrate the power of cutltural transmission upon language structure. It fits roughly into the same line of argument as Kirby, Hurford, Smith (K) et al.

There are two fascinating new papers about language evolution in Nature Neuroscience (institutional access required). The first, by Rilling et al is a comparative MRI scan of human and primates, looking at the circuit level activation of the arcuate fasciculus, the neural pathway that links two major language areas of the brain, Wernicke’s Area and Broca’s area. It is this pathway that is lesioned in Aphasiacs. They found a significant difference in the levels of connectivity and the location of the terminations of the pathway across the species. In two other control pathways where no difference was predicted, they found reasonable uniformity across the species.

Continue reading ‘MRI Species Study Offers Evidence for Gradualist Account’

A new PLoS paper by Okanoya et al claims to show rats engaging in significant tool use. As you might expect, the paper is pretty extensive and convincing, clearly demonstrating that rats can not only use tools, but differentiate between different categories of tools in different contexts. This is another piece of evidence against the idea that only humans can use tools and that tool use is the product of some sort of higher cognitive function. Already tool use has been observed in a wide range of species, from chimpanzees to birds.

I had the pleasure of sitting next to Okanoya at dinner during Evolang. He was a lovely guy and he whipped out his laptop and showed us some of the videos in this paper. He said the paper had only really been done to prove that even rats could use tools. His team certainly wasn’t making a comment about rats in particular. As he says in the paper, this is just more evidence that “tool use is not a specific faculty resulting from higher intelligence, but is a specific combination of more general cognitive faculties”. It is important to bear in mind though that these rats were trained to use tools and we don’t have any evidence yet of natural tool use.

 From The Guardian Science, by James Randerson

A fossilised jawbone and teeth found in a cave in northern Spain may have belonged to one of the first human ancestors to set foot in western Europe. The hominid has been identified as Homo antecessor, or pioneer man, a possible ancestor of both our own species and Neanderthals. The fossils date from between 1.1m and 1.2m years ago.

Continue reading ‘Fossil find could be Europe’s first humans’