Language and Evolution
New Scientist has a nice series on the human mind. I particularly liked Steven Mithen’s Thoroughly Mobile Minds. Here is a taste:
- Neanderthal technology remained largely unchanged for a quarter of a million years. Yet in roughly half that time the technology of H. sapiens has evolved from stone tools to the laptop on which I write this, not to mention the Internet to which it is connected. In fact, our technological evolution did not really get started until after the last ice age had reached its peak, a mere 20,000 years ago.
This phenomenal rate of culture change is the clue that there is something fundamentally different about H. sapiens from all the other members of the human genus. This something must lie within the mind and many would characterise it as symbolic thought the capacity to attribute an arbitrary meaning to a sound, movement or an object. The word “dog” neither looks, sounds nor smells like a dog, for example. Only H. sapiens has left us unambiguous evidence for those practices such as art, ritualised burial and body decoration that imply the presence of symbolic thought. This is Culture with a capital C, entirely different from the toolmaking traditions of chimpanzees. The evidence for symbolism becomes pervasive only about 50,000 years ago, but there are traces of engraved stone and uses of pigments that indicate symbolic thought reaches back to the origins of H. sapiens. It is a distinguishing feature of our species.
Courtesy of Brian Weatherson.