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Comment by zipwitch | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps not less intelligent, but just possessed of a mental framework that was less capable.

From a paper describing "the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"[1],

"the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children"

1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full

And here's a summary: https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...

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That’s incredible, and very compelling. It would explain the relatively sudden development of behavioural modernity over the few decades from 70k years ago.

I’ve read competing theories about the sudden development of abstract thinking and it’s propagation through speech as a form of memetic contagion, but I never really found it convincing. This makes perfect sense.

The idea that recursion was the key mutation that led to language is not doing so well lately. It turns out that non-human animals already can produce sequences with recursive structure [1]. It's also not clear that all languages have nested recursive structures.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz1002.full

The hypothesis here is quite a bit more nuanced and specific than that. As a laymam, I found it worthwhile to read the whole article. In the course of making its case it touches on many fascinating topics. I found the case quite compelling, though I can't rule out that someone more familiar with the facts can poke holes in it.

Was this hypothesis used in Snow Crash? I read the book too long ago to credit my memory but it made me think of the book

For Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson borrowed liberally from Julian Jaynes’ idea of Bicameralism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, really. It’s unlikely to be true, and unverifiable even so, but is a coherent and compelling frame through which to observe the world.

Thats a very interesting paper. Thank you.

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