EVOLUTION
Do the origins of mankind’s success lie in a sex-strike by our female ancestors?
IT ALL began with cosmetics. What did? The human success story. How we came out of Africa about a hundred thousand years ago, beat up all our rival species and invented language, art and religion. And we were able to do all this because of make-up.
But cosmetics were just the starting point, according to the latest theory.
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J. Linguistics 39(2003).
DOI: 10.1017/S0022226703252294
© 2003 Cambridge University Press
Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R. Hurford (eds.), The evolutionary emergence of language: social functions and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 426.
Reviewed by PHILIP LIEBERMAN, Brown University
Over the course of decades spanning a century, linguists avoided addressing the question of how human linguistic ability might have evolved. The apparent problem was the tendency towards unsupported speculation in the heady period in which evolution first became part of the conceptual framework of human thought. This remained the case until the last decade, even through the Chomskian ‘revolution’, although the centerpiece of the theories promulgated by Noam Chomsky is a hypothetical innate ‘Universal Grammar’ that determines the syntax of all human languages.
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Review of: The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View
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Independent on Sunday, 5 April 1998, pp44-45
BY MAREK KOHN
For centuries the origin of language has divided scientists. Now a new Darwinian theory is being proposed. But how can this make sense when our ability to talk depends on co-operation, and not competition?
SEVEN thousand tongues are spoken today, it’s said, and half a million may have come and gone since humans acquired the faculty of language, according to the Oxford biologist Mark Pagel. In their attempts to work out how that transformation might have occurred, scholars seem to have deployed comparable numbers of theories, perspectives, papers and bits of jargon. There are noun phrases, generative grammars, voice onset times and fricatives.
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