Something seems to have gone wrong somewhere. And indeed, we now believe that several of Chomsky’s evolutionary assumptions were incorrect. Recent reconstructions of the Neanderthal vocal tract show that Neanderthals probably did, in fact, have some speech capacity, perhaps very modern in quality. It is also becoming clear that, far from the dumb brutes of popular myth, they had a sophisticated material culture – including the ability to create cave engravings and produce sophisticated stone tools – not dissimilar to aspects of the human cultural explosion of 50,000 years ago. It is hard to see how they could have managed the complex learning and co-operation required for that if they didn’t have language. Moreover, recent genetic analysis reveals there was a fair bit of interbreeding that took place – most modern humans have a few bits of distinctively Neanderthal DNA. Far from modern humans arriving on the scene and wiping out the hapless ape men, it now looks like early Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis could have co-habited and interbred. It does not seem farfetched to speculate that they might also have communicated with one another. This is all very well, but questions remain. Why is it that today, only humans have language, the most complex of animal behaviours? Surely something must have happened to cut us off from our nearest surviving relatives. The challenge for the anti‑language-instinct camp is to say what that might be. And a likely explanation comes from what we might dub our ‘co‑operative intelligence’, and the events that set it in motion, more than 2 million years ago.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:33:35 +0000
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