Hear a Neanderthal Talk (and Other Interesting Neanderthal Language Rumblings)

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.

Evolang Post #4

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.

Languages Change in Punctuational Bursts

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.

Evolang 08 – Plenary Speakers Day 2

The next day brought a couple of plenary speakers who both spoke on fascinating topics but somehow managed to make them dull as hell or inpenetratable.

Rudolph Botha began by looking at exaptation and argued that it is a mechanism that is too frequently employed in accounts of language evolution. He painstakingly went through a series of examples in the literature where exaptation is heavily invoked and tried to show that it did not meet the standards for exaptation that most biologists would use. It was persuasive, and on an interesting topic, but somehow Botha contrived to make it duller than a Calvinist sermon. Come on Rudi, this subject is naturally cool, it shouldn’t have the life sucked out of it like this.

Evolang 08 – More Plenary Speakers

Okay, more biased rambling commentary on Evolang 08…

On day two the proper conference began and we were treated to two excellent plenary speakers, Gary Marcus and Susan Goldin-Meadow.

I’d never heard of Gary Marcus before but he presented one of the most stimulating presentations of the whole week. The title of his talk, “Language as Kluge”, was intriguing, but sounded a bit too technical to really whet the appetite. As he got into his talk I was very pleasantly surprised by the broad brush approach he used, and the attention-to-detail he used to back it up.

Cool Neo-Whorfian Stuff

More evidence for language affecting cognition. Here’s a lovely long post at Mixing Memory about a PLoS paper showing language having a measurable influence on colour perception.

Major Language Evolution Papers # 3

The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?

-Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky & W. Tecumseh Fitch

Who’s it by?

The big dog Chomsky, granddaddy of modern linguistics, in association with Tecumseh Fitch and Mark Hauser, a psychologist and a biologist respectively, both heavily involved in the field of language evolution.

What’s it about?

A much misunderstood paper and probably the most debated paper on language evolution there has ever been. In it the authors make an impassioned plea for a comparative approach to solving the language evolution problem, and draw up a list of features that belong to the narrow language faculty possessed by humans (just recursion) and a those which belong to a broader definition of language features that can be found in the animal kingdom (everything else).

Why should an evolutionary linguist care?

Because this is the only meaningful attempt to reconcile language evolution with the chomskian consensus in modern linguistics. However, this paper is probably more Hauser and Fitch than Chomsky, and lots of people have used it to engage in a bit of Chomsky bashing by misrepresenting its central claims. The distinction between the FLN and FLB is meant to emphasise the value of the broad language faculty, rather than seeking to claim something special about the narrow language faculty, at least from Hauser and Fitch’s perspective.

Animal Cognition and Philosophy

There is a great philosophy paper about animal cognition here. It covers a lot of familiar ground for evolutionary linguists but there is some great discussion of metacognition experiments and a pretty comprehensive list of all of the most important animal behavior papers of the last thirty years. Well worth reading for newcomers and experts alike.

Oral traditions can affect tribal survival in natural disasters like Tsunamis

This is a very interesting press release from UC Santa Cruz. The researcher found much higher survival rates in areas with previous knowledge of Tsunamis and with long term populations steeped in the oral traditions of the culture

“they had heard stories passed down from their elders about how to recognize a tsunami and how to respond. These people knew that when they saw the sea draw down, it was time to run for the hills. … ”

Oral traditions are a very efficient means of tsunami education,” said Day, a visiting research associate in Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz…

“It became apparent that oral traditions were going back 500 years,” Day explained. “The stories contained information about how to recognize when a tsunami was about to come, such as falling sea levels, and told how people should take action…”

In contrast, Day found from a review of the literature, casualties from other tsunamis are much higher in areas inhabited by recent immigrants with no indigenous knowledge about these events. For example, video evidence showed that many people in Thailand in 2004 did not recognize the warning signs of a tsunami and did not realize that there was a safe place to go less than one kilometer away …”

The focus of the study is obviously the future prevention of Tsunami casualties, but it does offer us an excellent demonstration of the interwoven nature of biological survival, cultural behavior and language. The preservation of knowledge can have a direct relationship with an individual’s genetic survival, and it poses the interesting question as to whether the memetic information contained in an oral tradition is adapted to the needs of its users? For this correlation between oral traditions and tsunami survival to be significant then every oral tradition must have preserved this information.  In addition, any cultural adaptation can only take place at a group level. You can’t have an oral culture of one…

So many unanswered questions are posed by this information that I’d love to see some more research done that focused specifically on the issue on the relationship between oral cultures and group survival.

BBC Radio Documentary about Sequencing Neanderthal DNA

There was a great documentary about the attempts to sequence Neanderthal DNA on BBC Radio 4 last night, with a fairly extensive discussion about finding FOXP2. Well worth a listen if you get a chance. You can download it here, click on the ‘Listen Again’ link in the blue box on the left hand side of the screen.