Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 24, 2013, 01:16 (3988 days ago) @ xeno6696


> Matt: Which I argue can be explained that as we shifted from living in trees to living on the plains, walking upright, hand gestures (which are used extensively by gorillas in the wild) no longer worked for nomadic hunters that had to spread out in order to catch large prey. The driver for translating hand gestures into sounds created a selective pressure based on the survival demands of hunting.-Your suppositions are only a small part of the underlying story.I don't expect you to remember a bit from my book (pg. 128) that the physical adaptations for speech arrived with H. erectus 1.5 million years ago, long before real speech is thought to have begun. One of Ian Tattersall's exaptations. The changes involved arching the palate, dropping the larynx and developing an epiglottis to prevent trachea blockages, and better tongue muscles to wrap around word pronunciation, well before speech appeared..