This chapter presents a Darwinian account of how humans became the symbolic species. It challenge... more This chapter presents a Darwinian account of how humans became the symbolic species. It challenges the widely held idea that symbolic culture did not emerge until long after our African speciation. Red ochre use appears as a cumulative cultural tradition emerging prior to modern humans, becoming ubiquitous with modern Homo sapiens. One argument for the evolution of within-group cooperation has been inter-group conflict, but this is unlikely to result in sexual morality. An alternative model of “reverse dominance” or “gender” warfare is explored, generating playful, ritual contest between the sexes. As a reproductive strategy, women in coalitions resisted dominant male attempts to monopolize fertile females without providing adequate investment. Ritual bodypaint performances established symbolic culture, morality, kinship, and the sexual division of labor. Investor males drove the success of this symbolic strategy through sexual selection of ritually decorated females, linked to the ...
The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that... more The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters-and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and music, and language and dance. It also provides an explanation for the obvious fact that so much in language is non-optimal for purposes of communicating cognitive information.
Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evoluti... more Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution. Could it be that language simply cannot evolve in a Darwinian world? Reviewing the insights of Noam Chomsky, Amotz Zahavi and Dan Sperber, this article shows how and why each apparently depicts language's emergence as theoretically impossible. Chomsky shuns evolutionary arguments, asserting simply that language was instantaneously installed. Zahavi argues that language entails reliance on low cost conventional signals whose evolutionary emergence would contradict basic Darwinian theory. Sperber argues that a symbolic expression is, literally, a falsehood, adding to the difficulty of explaining howin a Darwinan worldsystematic reliance on language could ever have evolved. It is concluded that language exists, but for reasons which no currently accepted theoretical paradigm can explain. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 'Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.' Umberto Eco (1976: 7) 'Language is, at its core, a system that is both digital and infinite', writes Noam Chomsky (1991: 50). 'To my knowledge', he adds, 'there is no other biological system with these properties.' Chomsky attributes the capacity to deploy finite
Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexib... more Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners' resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted in the human case, we argue, because the original victims of our species' first deceptive vocalizations were nonhuman animals. When our ancestors were vulnerable hominins equipped with limited weaponry, they kept predators away by increasing the range and diversity of their vocal calls. This led to choral singing, primarily by females, and deceptive mimicry of animal calls, primarily by scavenging and hunting males. A critical feature of our model is the core principle of reversal, whereby deceptive signals aimed originally by a coalition against an external target are subsequently redeployed for honest communicative purposes within the group. We argue that this dynamic culminated ultimately in gestural, vocal, and ritual metaphor, opening the way to word formation and the rapid emergence of grammar.
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang12)
For human spoken language to emerge, selection pressures must have acted upon a primate-style pre... more For human spoken language to emerge, selection pressures must have acted upon a primate-style precursor that had evolved subjet to the constraints of Darwinian signal evolution theory. Science is a search for conceptual unification. Consistently applied, a single new Darwinian pressure-selection for trust-based efficiency-suffices to explain the core features which distinguish speech from nonhuman primate vocal communication. This paper is distributed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-ND license.
ABSTRACT Common to language and kinship is digital format. This is a discovery, not an innate fea... more ABSTRACT Common to language and kinship is digital format. This is a discovery, not an innate feature of human cognition. But to produce a testable model, we need Darwinian behavioural ecology.
Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolu... more Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity. Modern Darwinism seeks to harmonize research into human life with the rest of scientific knowledge. This project depends, however, on accounting for the emergence of symbolic culture, including speech, a system of commun...
This chapter presents a Darwinian account of how humans became the symbolic species. It challenge... more This chapter presents a Darwinian account of how humans became the symbolic species. It challenges the widely held idea that symbolic culture did not emerge until long after our African speciation. Red ochre use appears as a cumulative cultural tradition emerging prior to modern humans, becoming ubiquitous with modern Homo sapiens. One argument for the evolution of within-group cooperation has been inter-group conflict, but this is unlikely to result in sexual morality. An alternative model of “reverse dominance” or “gender” warfare is explored, generating playful, ritual contest between the sexes. As a reproductive strategy, women in coalitions resisted dominant male attempts to monopolize fertile females without providing adequate investment. Ritual bodypaint performances established symbolic culture, morality, kinship, and the sexual division of labor. Investor males drove the success of this symbolic strategy through sexual selection of ritually decorated females, linked to the ...
The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that... more The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters-and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and music, and language and dance. It also provides an explanation for the obvious fact that so much in language is non-optimal for purposes of communicating cognitive information.
Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evoluti... more Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution. Could it be that language simply cannot evolve in a Darwinian world? Reviewing the insights of Noam Chomsky, Amotz Zahavi and Dan Sperber, this article shows how and why each apparently depicts language's emergence as theoretically impossible. Chomsky shuns evolutionary arguments, asserting simply that language was instantaneously installed. Zahavi argues that language entails reliance on low cost conventional signals whose evolutionary emergence would contradict basic Darwinian theory. Sperber argues that a symbolic expression is, literally, a falsehood, adding to the difficulty of explaining howin a Darwinan worldsystematic reliance on language could ever have evolved. It is concluded that language exists, but for reasons which no currently accepted theoretical paradigm can explain. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 'Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.' Umberto Eco (1976: 7) 'Language is, at its core, a system that is both digital and infinite', writes Noam Chomsky (1991: 50). 'To my knowledge', he adds, 'there is no other biological system with these properties.' Chomsky attributes the capacity to deploy finite
Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexib... more Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners' resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted in the human case, we argue, because the original victims of our species' first deceptive vocalizations were nonhuman animals. When our ancestors were vulnerable hominins equipped with limited weaponry, they kept predators away by increasing the range and diversity of their vocal calls. This led to choral singing, primarily by females, and deceptive mimicry of animal calls, primarily by scavenging and hunting males. A critical feature of our model is the core principle of reversal, whereby deceptive signals aimed originally by a coalition against an external target are subsequently redeployed for honest communicative purposes within the group. We argue that this dynamic culminated ultimately in gestural, vocal, and ritual metaphor, opening the way to word formation and the rapid emergence of grammar.
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang12)
For human spoken language to emerge, selection pressures must have acted upon a primate-style pre... more For human spoken language to emerge, selection pressures must have acted upon a primate-style precursor that had evolved subjet to the constraints of Darwinian signal evolution theory. Science is a search for conceptual unification. Consistently applied, a single new Darwinian pressure-selection for trust-based efficiency-suffices to explain the core features which distinguish speech from nonhuman primate vocal communication. This paper is distributed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-ND license.
ABSTRACT Common to language and kinship is digital format. This is a discovery, not an innate fea... more ABSTRACT Common to language and kinship is digital format. This is a discovery, not an innate feature of human cognition. But to produce a testable model, we need Darwinian behavioural ecology.
Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolu... more Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity. Modern Darwinism seeks to harmonize research into human life with the rest of scientific knowledge. This project depends, however, on accounting for the emergence of symbolic culture, including speech, a system of commun...
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