Look who was talking

We began talking as early as 2.5m years ago, writes Stephen Oppenheimer. Is
that what drove the growth of our brains?

Thursday August 7, 2003
The Guardian

When did we start talking to each other and how long did it take us to become
so good at it? In the absence of palaeo-cassette recorders or a time
machine the problem might seem insoluble, but analysis of recent evidence
suggests we may have started talking as early as 2.5m years ago.

There is a polar divide on the issues of dating and linking thought, language
and material culture. One view of language development, held by linguists such
as Noam Chomsky and anthropologists such as Richard Klein, is that language,
specifically the spoken word, appeared suddenly among modern humans between
35,000 and 50,000 years ago and that the ability to speak words and use syntax
was recently genetically hard-wired into our brains in a kind of language
organ.

This view of language is associated with the old idea that logical thought is
dependent on words, a concept originating with Plato and much in vogue in the
19th century: animals do not speak because they do not think. The advances in
communication and abstract thought demonstrated by chimps and bonobos such as
the famous Kanzi put this theory in doubt.

The notion of a great leap forward in the quality of human thinking is further
reflected in a common interpretation of the flowering of Upper Palaeolithic art
in Europe. European cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet in France and carved
figurines that have been dated to over 30,000 years ago are seen, according to
this perspective, as the first stirrings of symbolic and abstract thought and
also of language.

The problem with using art as prehistoric evidence for the first human that
could speak is that, quite apart from its validity, the further back one looks
the more chance the evidence for art itself would have perished.

Full text
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/lastword/story/0,13228,1013222,00.html



--
Mark Hubey
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey