Michael Corballis - University of Auckland
Mental prerequisites for language
Abstract: A critical feature of language is displacement, the capacity to refer to events at times and places other than the present. Mental time travel itself probably has ancient evolutionary origins. Studies of the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit in rats show that place cells in the hippocampus not only represent present locations, but can also replay past trajectories in space and even preplay possible future ones. Through interactions with entorhinal grid cells, place cells can be rapidly remapped to correspond to different environments, adjust for different orientations and spatial perspectives (“zooming”) and tag locations with sensory associations. These properties underlie the generative, recursive nature of language as it later emerged to allow us to share mental time travels with others, thereby enhancing social bonding and cooperation. Communication itself may have evolved through the co-opting of intentional action systems, at first through pantomime and transparent gestures, such as pointing. Through conventionalization and pressure toward more economical production, the iconic aspect was gradually curtailed, and for the most part lost.
Dan Dediu - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Language doesn't evolve in a void: culture, biology and physical environment
Abstract: Language originated, evolved and exists in a complex and highly dynamic context with which it interacts in many, often subtle and surprising, ways. Here I will argue that we must seriously consider this rich context and interactions, and that recent advances in several disciplines provide not only new data and quantitative methods but also generate a profound change in our mindset, promising to give new answers to old questions and, more importantly, to ask new and unexpected questions. Larger and richer linguistic databases covering more and more languages at multiple levels, coupled with advanced statistical methods (some imported from evolutionary biology) and increased computer power, suggest that the physical environment the speakers inhabit seemingly influence structural properties of the languages they speak. Even if these proposals are controversial, they point the way towards a systematic, quantitative and multidisciplinary research program linking properties of language to properties of its physical environment. Incontestably, also the biology of the speakers influences language in non-trivial ways, ranging from properties of our cognitive system to features of our vocal tract and hearing organs, but I will argue in this talk that biology affects not only the universal aspects of language and speech but is also a factor in explaining linguistic diversity. This type of biological biases can be different in different human populations, differentially influencing the trajectory of language change and resulting in structural differences between languages. I will discuss some proposals in this vein and the data and methods required to test them, focusing on the structure of the vocal tract and its potential impact on phonetics and phonology. However, language is primarily a cultural system and, to be effective, these extra-linguistic factors must interact with the process of linguistic cultural evolution. This process was, for most of our evolution, immediate, face-to-face and embedded in a rich multi-modal communicative social context, and it is in such contexts that language use and acquisition take place and where such biases must act. On the other hand, language itself creates new opportunities and pressures on the biological, cognitive and physical systems supporting it, resulting in a closed feedback loop whereby language is shaped and in turn shapes these systems. Such an enclosing view, treating language in its complex dynamic environment and part of multiple feedback loops, effectively constructing its own niche, allows us to better understand the evolution of language and of the systems subtending it, as well as the present-day patterning of linguistic diversity and universal tendencies.
Francesco D'Errico - University of Bordeaux
Cultural exaptation, a key mechanism for understanding the emergence of complex cultural transmission
Abstract: Fifteen years ago, the saga of Neanderthal extinction and colonization of Europe by modern humans served to scholars from different disciplines as a narrative to explain the path that our species followed to attain ‘modern’ behavior and language. This path was thought to be short, abrupt, exclusively associated with anatomically modern humans, and best reflected in the cultural traits associated with the ‘Aurignacian’, seen at the time as an indissoluble package of fully modern cultural traits. An updated review of evidence on the emergence of key cultural innovations in our lineage challenges the idea of a strict link between biological and behavioral change, and suggests that modern cognition and language are results of a gradual, complex and non-linear process to whose advancement different human populations have contributed. This pattern may appear patchy to those who seek single cause models for the emergence of human societies comparable to ours. It is less so for those who consider "modernity" and symbolic behavior as the outcome of cultural trajectories that need to be understood and traced at a regional scale. We argue that innovations in symbolic practices can be seen as exaptations of cultural traits that played symbolic or non-symbolic functions in antecedent cultural systems. This implies that relationship between changes in cultural adaptation and evolution of cognition in our genus must be seen as dialectic, progressive in nature, and more dependent on brain plasticity and adaptability than on isolation and speciation events.
Daniel Dor - Tel Aviv University
From Experience to Imagination: The Origin and Evolution of Language as a Communication Technology
Abstract: In this talk, I will present a new general hypothesis concerning the entire process of the origin and further evolutionary development of human language and its speakers. The hypothesis is based on the theory of language I develop in Dor (2015), and I will begin my talk with a quick exposition of the essential claim: language should be properly understood as a social communication technology of a very particular type, collectively constructed for the very specific function of the instruction of imagination. All the other systems of intentional communication, used by humans and other species, work with what I call the experiential strategy: they provide materials for the interlocutors to experience with their senses and thus allow for the actual sharing of experience. Crucially, the experiential strategy is inherently limited: only what can be directly presented to the interlocutor's senses can be communicated. Language is the only system that goes beyond the sharing of experience. It allows speakers to intentionally and systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intended experience - instead of directly experiencing it. The speaker provides the receiver with a code, a skeletal list of the basic co-ordinates of the experience - which the receiver is then expected to use as a scaffold for experiential imagination. The essence of the instructive strategy, and its implementation, lies in the fact that it requires a huge amount of collective effort to make it work, prior to actual communication - the effort of experiential mutual identification: the never-ending process of the careful mapping and marking of those points in experience, and those ways of communicating, which the different speakers within the community, with their variable private experiences, may count on, more or less reliably, as shared foundations for communication. In general terms, then, the evolutionary hypothesis I will present runs as follows:
1. The pre-history of language: ancient hominins (most probably homo Erectus) invented and stabilized the collective capacity for experiential mutual-identification, which they still used only for experiential communication. It was exactly what allowed them to make their enormous advances at all the relevant material, cultural and social levels. 2. With mutual-identification, however, Erectus communities also brought experiential communication to the limits of its functional envelope. As survival came to depend more and more on the collective capacity for communication, the need to go beyond experiential communication became a necessity. 3. The moment of origin consisted of no more than exploratory attempts to use the collective capacity of experiential mutual-identification for a new communicative function - the instruction of imagination. 4. When the new function began to show its potential, a developmental process was launched that was directly driven throughout by the constant pressure to raise the levels of collective success in instructive communication. I will present a detailed hypothetical narration of the process, in which language gradually develops from within its experiential-mimetic background into an autonomous technology, with its own functional and structural properties. 5. Throughout the process, individuals were selected for their ability to meet the challenges of the emerging technology, and the required capacities were (partially and variably) genetically accommodated. Homo Sapiens, an imaginative species adapted for fast speech, and maybe our sisters species too, eventually emerged from the collectively-driven process with unique adaptations to language. 6. The evolutionary hypothesis thus shows exceptionally high levels of developmental determinism: if we agree to position the instruction of imagination at the center of the story, we find that much of the way languages are today, and much of the way we are today, was already there, as functional potential, at the moment of origin.
Dor, Daniel (2015). The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology, Oxford University Press.
Ian Tattersall - American Museum of Natural History
An Evolutionary Context for the Acquisition of Modern Human Cognition and Language
Abstract: Modern human beings process information symbolically, rearranging mental symbols according to rules to envision multiple potential realities. They also express the ideas thus formed using structured articulate language. No other living creature does either of these things, reflecting a qualitative cognitive gulf between modern Homo sapiens and all the other species – including not only their own closest living relatives, but their closest extinct ones – that compose the Great Tree of Life. Yet it is evident that we are descended from a nonsymbolic and nonlinguistic ancestor. How did this astonishing transformation occur? Scrutiny of the fossil and archaeological records reveals that the transition to symbolic reasoning happened very late in hominid history – indeed, within the tenure of anatomically recognizable Homo sapiens. It was evidently not simply a passive result of the increase in brain size that typified multiple lineages of the genus Homo over the Pleistocene. I propose that a brain exaptively capable of complex symbolic manipulation and language acquisition was acquired as a byproduct of the major developmental reorganization that gave rise to the anatomically distinctive species Homo sapiens at about 200,000 years ago, and that this new capacity was recruited later, through the action of a cultural stimulus. In evolutionary terms this would have been a rather routine happening: after all, any structure must necessarily be in place before it can be used for a new purpose. Given the intimate interdependence of modern cognition and language – both are intrinsically symbolic activities – the most plausible cultural trigger for symbolic thought processes was the spontaneous invention of language in an African isolate of Homo sapiensat (very approximately) 100,000 years ago. Language has several advantages in this role relative to other putative stimuli such as theory of mind.
Elisabetta Visalberghi - Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies - CNR Rome
Stone tool use in nonhuman primates. A comparison between FBV bearded capuchins and Tai chimpanzees
Abstract: Stone tool use occurs in a few nonhuman primates (namely chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys and crab eating macaques). This behaviour holds special interest for scientists concerned with human origins. Stone tool use in wild bearded capuchin monkeys has been discovered 12 years ago and since then thoroughly investigated by the participants of the EthoCebus Project. The last common ancestors of living tool-using non-human primate species and Homo lived 7-8 mya for Pan and Homo and 35 mya for capuchins and Homo. The phylogenetic distance among these taxa makes the argument that also their common ancestor used tools unlikely; instead, it suggests that stone tool use has emerged independently in more than one species. However, phylogenetic distance predicts higher complexity is stone tool use in chimpanzees than in capuchins. By examining the the ecological settings in which this behaviour occurs in and by focusing on the aspects of nut-cracking that have important cognitive implications (namely, namely selection of tools, tool transport, tool modification, and modulation of actions to reach the goal of cracking the nut), I will discuss whether the observed differences reflect ecological, morphological, social and/or cognitive factors.