Human evolution; Erectus speech (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 08, 2021, 20:58 (1083 days ago) @ David Turell

Most probably they had some rudimentary language:

https://aeon.co/essays/tools-and-voyages-suggest-that-homo-erectus-invented-language?ut...

"Evidence that erectus had language comes from their settlements, their art, their symbols, their sailing ability and their tools. Erectus settlements are found throughout most of the old world. And, most importantly for the idea that erectus had language, open oceans were not barriers to their travel.

"Erectus had relative shortcomings of course, beyond possibly lacking the range of sounds of modern humans. It also lacked the modern form of the important FOXP2 gene that sapiens have. Do the shortcomings of vocal apparatus and primitive genes pose a problem for the idea that erectus had language? Not at all. For example, the evolution of speech was triggered by language – as we developed languages, the modes of expressing them improved over time. Yes, sapiens speech is likely better than erectus speech. But this doesn’t mean that erectus lacked speech. Any mammal could have speech with the sounds they are capable of producing today. They just need the right kind of brain. The sapiens version of FOXP2 helps us to articulate sounds more easily and to think more quickly and efficiently than erectus. But it is not a ‘language gene’. And though erectus might have had, as it were, the ‘Model T’ version of this gene while we possess the ‘Tesla version’, their ‘primitive’ FOXP2 would not have deprived them of language. FOXP2 and other genes adapted partially due to evolutionary pressure from language and culture."

Comment: McCrone's book, The Ape that Spoke, agrees that Erectus could have had a slow speech, a few words a minute. And I would assume they used lots of sign language. A very long fascinating essay.

More from the essay:

"Modern English has sentences as simple as ‘You drink. You drive. You go to jail.’ Yet in spite of such grammatical simplicity, we understand these examples just fine. In fact, one can construct similar sentences in any language that will be intelligible to all native speakers of the language. Interpretation requires cultural context, not complex grammar – but this facilitates it, explaining why so many languages have complex grammars, as I explain in Language: The Cultural Tool (2012).

"But what about the many modern paleoanthropologists, linguists and others who do not believe that erectus was capable of modern language because their tools were so primitive? Bollocks. This attribution of inability to erectus is based on a number of errors in reasoning: (i) it focuses almost exclusively on stone tools for erectus, ignoring evidence for bone and wooden tools; (ii) it errs in either assuming that settlements on multiple islands were the result of land bridges or accidents due to wind; (iii) it appears not to consider the significance of erectus village organisation; (iv) no study of erectus speech appears to recognise that speech came later than language and that the human vocal apparatus needs to be able to produce only a small number of sounds to have speech (but see the recent research on macaques led by the evolutionary biologist W Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna); (v) it fails to understand that tools become symbols; (vi) it tends to overestimate the difficulty of having language and fails to realise how slot-filler grammars follow from symbols based on duality-of-patterning.

"The conclusion that erectus invented language through their higher intelligence and cultural development is strong, as evidenced by the archaeological record. But if language is merely a technology based on symbols and grammar, other creatures could have also discovered it. If they didn’t, it would be because they lack culture. There are some claims that other animals have language as it is defined here – information-transfer via symbols. It is well-known, after all, that many animals can learn symbols. Some examples are horses, great apes and dogs. What is unclear is whether nonhumans invent symbols in the wild. They would need culture to do so. No strong evidence for this exists.

"The available evidence then strongly suggests that erectus invented language more than a million years ago. In so doing, Homo erectus changed the world more than any creature since, including their grandchild, Homo sapiens."

Comment: so we inherited a simple form of language and our bigger forebrain fully developed it theoretically70,000 years ago. This essay reappeared so I added to the entry things I had no room for before. In past entries here I presented Everett fighting with Chomsky about language theory. McCrone pays more attention to the vocal anatomy differences than Everett. It is not clear why Everett sloughs it off.