From: slawomirmiroslawski
Message: 1077
Date: 2003-08-07
>Oppenheimer. Is
>
> Look who was talking
>
> We began talking as early as 2.5m years ago, writes Stephen
> that what drove the growth of our brains?Aci. Yes.
> Thursday August 7, 2003to become
> The Guardian
>
> When did we start talking to each other and how long did it take us
> so good at it? In the absence of palaeo-cassette recorders or a timeevidence
> machine the problem might seem insoluble, but analysis of recent
> suggests we may have started talking as early as 2.5m years ago.thought, language
>
> There is a polar divide on the issues of dating and linking
> and material culture. One view of language development, held bylinguists such
> as Noam Chomsky and anthropologists such as Richard Klein, is thatlanguage,
> specifically the spoken word, appeared suddenly among modern humansbetween
> 35,000 and 50,000 years ago and that the ability to speak words anduse syntax
> was recently genetically hard-wired into our brains in a kind oflanguage
> organ.The gens in terms of population shoul be treated as wery elastic
> This view of language is associated with the old idea that logicalthought is
> dependent on words, a concept originating with Plato and much invogue in the
> 19th century: animals do not speak because they do not think. Theadvances in
> communication and abstract thought demonstrated by chimps andbonobos such as
> the famous Kanzi put this theory in doubt.is further
>
> The notion of a great leap forward in the quality of human thinking
> reflected in a common interpretation of the flowering of UpperPalaeolithic art
> in Europe. European cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet in Franceand 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 abstractthought and
> also of language.human that
>
> The problem with using art as prehistoric evidence for the first
> could speak is that, quite apart from its validity, the furtherback one looks
> the more chance the evidence for art itself would have perished.http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/lastword/story/0,13228,1013222,00.html
>
> Full text
>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark Hubey
> hubeyh@...
> http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey