How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

by Daniel L. Everett

First, ‘highly encephalized species … tend to forage (or hunt) strategically, taking into account the habits of their food (or prey), while less encephalized species tend to graze (or hunt) opportunistically’.

Further, ‘As brain size increases, different areas of the cortex become less directly connected with each other.’ The consequence of this changed connectivity is that ‘as brains increase in size, areas are increasingly able to carry out processing independent of other regions … Such independence makes parallel processing increasingly possible and this has significant consequences because it leads to great sophistication in behavioral response.’

human brains are superior due in part to much greater neuronal density – we have more neurons per cubic centimetre overall and more connections between them.

the brain grew from the time of Australopithecus from approximately 500cm3 to nearly 1,300cm3 in a relatively short space of 125,000 generations, or 3 million years.

Apparently, the Hobbit had lived until as recently as 18,000 years ago, perhaps even as recently as 14,000 years ago.

In fact floresiensis’s brain was smaller than the brain size of many australopithecines, coming in at around 426cm3

Both had similar brain sizes and both were around 3'11" (1.19m) tall,

There is no evidence other than cranial size to suppose that Homo floresiensis was any less intelligent than Homo erectus.

In other words, just as it is the relationships between neurons that make the brain so complex, so it is the exponential growth in relationships as societal numbers increased arithmetically that required more intellectual horsepower in order to keep track of those relationships,

In other words, as group sizes grew, the human cortex grew as well.

Some modern European women have brains of only around 950cm3, nearly identical in size to the brains of Homo erectus. Yet they certainly seem as intelligent as modern males with larger brains.

Glial cells and mast cells form part of the brain’s neuroimmune system, independent of the immune system that protects the rest of the body.

marshalled

It is often claimed that there are language-specific areas of the brain such as Wernicke’s area or Broca’s area. There are not.

the importance of the subcortical region known as the basal ganglia to language.

the basal ganglia (sometimes referred to as the ‘reptilian brain’),

this region is a fundamental component of language function, even though not specifically evolved for language. It is known that the ganglia are crucial for language because harm to them produces a number of aphasic conditions.

responsibility for language lies with various regions of the brain that contribute in multiple ways

How bizarre it would be to claim that the hands are language organs.

But if the organisation of the human brain is that plastic, how is it that the sapiens brain takes the form and shape that it does? The answer is that brain growth and development is guided not only by genes but also by

histones that control ‘transcription factors’. A transcription factor is simply a protein that connects (‘binds’) to specific sequences of DNA. By doing this, these factors are able to determine the rate of transcription. That is how information from the genes is passed from DNA to messenger RNA.

The brain uses and reuses its various areas in order to accomplish all of the challenges that modern humans confront.

unwarranted

Neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland.

the ventral (underside) view of the brain

Nearly 69 billion of our brain neurons, 80 per cent of all our neurons, are located in the cerebellum or ‘little brain’, which sits just below the cortex.

(glial cells and mast cells) that offer an independent neuroimmune system, distinct from the immune system for the rest of the body.

An added complication is that every human brain is unique – no two brains have exactly the same pattern of gyri and sulci.

First, erectus did have symbolic representations – tools, status symbols and etchings.

Remember that erectus sailed. This activity alone demonstrates that erectus was able to think ahead, to imagine and to communicate. Even if erectus’s language lacked hierarchical syntax,

Some researchers have correctly demonstrated that the evidence for language goes back at least to Homo neanderthalensis, some 500,000 years ago. But there is no reason that language could not reach back even further. Like sapiens, neanderthalensis were beaten to the invention of language by their ancestors, Homo erectus.

a grammatical rule called ‘Merge’ as the basis for all human language. Merge is simply an operation that combines two objects to form a larger object.

Grammar is symbols used together. Syntax is the arrangement of those symbols as they are used together.

The problem is that the operation Merge is not found in all human languages.

Merge is therefore not a prerequisite for human language.

understanding meaning or semantic processing,

Miller discovered, however, that if items are ‘chunked’, then people are able to remember larger numbers of items. This turned out to be a great result for science, but also for Bell Labs. Bell discovered that a person might have difficulty remembering the number 5831740263 but that they could easily remember it if it were ‘chunked’, as in (583) (174) (0263).

It further turns out that working memory is biased towards sound-based memories, which means not only that it is important for remembering and decoding utterances, but also that it seems to have partially evolved for that very purpose, language once again helping to shape human evolution.

The French philosopher René Descartes

touchstone

He was a pioneer who brought innovative, original thinking back into fashion after more than five centuries of talking about people instead of ideas. Before Descartes and a few others, there yawned back into the shadows the nearly 1,000-year-long, oppressive Dark Ages, during which ‘reasoning’ was an act of power. Because of this, ad hominem arguments for one’s views – arguments based o...

his popular thesis of dualism – the proposal that the mind is our soul and is non-material, be it spiritual, Platonic, or merely mental, while the body is material. According to Descartes, these are two irreconcilable substances. He suggested that the s...

Therefore, if we accept this dualism, we reject the idea that the mind evolved by natural selection.

In this conception, the word ‘mind’ refers to the brain activities

If it is correct that language is a cultural artefact, the absence of a specialised brain area for it is predicted. If this idea is wrong, though, then language is more like vision and there should be evidence that language is innately linked to a particular location of the brain, specialised for language.

ASD sufferers often seem to lack this capacity of mutual ‘grooming’ behaviours that establish that two or more individuals ‘belong’ together and accept one another.

Trustees

indictment

reed

one hundred muscles of the larynx,