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Comment by QuercusMax | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything", and one of the main points they've made so far is that once modern humans became recognizable as such, we were doing all the human-type things we do now: thinking about our place in the world, debating different ways to live and their pros and cons, and so forth.

We tend to think of prehistoric humans as being stupid cavemen, but I suspect we'd find them to basically the same as us, just with a different context and level of knowledge about some things - but also far greater understanding of other things.

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I wish there was any way to know when language was developed in (proto?) humans. Our complex grammar is pretty unique in the animal kingdom, and it's clearly linked to our cognition. You can get pretty far with mere vocabulary (just look at the great apes), but once you get into the world of words modifying words and recombining into sentences, you have an absolute explosion of expressible ideas.

When did that happen? IMO, it's pretty clear the Chompsky school is at least partially correct in that we have biological hardware for grammatical language. So we've probably had language as long as we've been homo sapiens. Neanderthals probably spoke, too. But what about Homo Erectus? Australopithecus?

My entirely layman and unsupported conspiracy theory about language is that early hominids likely developed complex sign language and some primitive forms of writing now long lost to time, but vocal language only came with the necessary biology.

Do we have an idea of when the physical capability for vocal language originated? Other great apes have all kinds of vocalizations they can produce, and you don't need THAT many different sounds to support language.

To answer that you'd need to know what even constitutes vocal language. There's a number of languages that make extensive use of clicks and whistles that would seem to me are pretty orthogonal to the ability to pronounce, say, English.

We know from their remains that Neanderthals would have had a rather different range of vocalizations from Homo sapiens, but that doesn't mean they didn't have structured language.

More recent hypotheses that I’ve read is that what we think of language evolved as a tool for internal thought and ordering of ideas and perceptions. Executive function, in a sense.

The externalization of language, whether vocal or gestural, evolved later as a means of serializing the internal language in order to transmit those thoughts to others. Under this hypothesis, the serial nature of language is a limitation of the externalization methods (you can’t produce several words at once, or hear several at once), whereas internal language itself need not be a linear process.

> ...and it's clearly linked to our cognition.

People with global aphasia can still do arithmetic, follow causal reasoning, play chess, pass theory-of-mind tasks, etc. During non-linguistic reasoning, math, music and executive tasks, neuroimaging has revealed that the language centers in the brain are pretty darn quiet.

So the link, and the causal direction if any, is not really known.

There’s a great book called Paleopoetics by Christopher Collin’s that looks at exactly that

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