Gordon W. Hewes

The Archaeology of Perception: Traces of Depiction and Language [and Comments and Reply]

Depiction, particularly the making of images to resemble things, can only have emerged prehistorically incommunities with shared systems of meanings. We argue, on the basis of an articulation of Gibsons ecological theory of perception, Meads distinction between communication and language, and a portmanteau theory of language and mind relying on the insights of, among others, Ryle, Vygotsky, and Olson, that depiction transforms communication into language. The rapid change in numerous practices observable at the end of the Upper Pleistocene becomes understandable when communication is seen to be tuming into language as here defined. It is for this reason that the period in question represents the point of evolution of modem human beings.

The Human Revolution [and Comments and Reply]

Except for an introductory discussion of methodology, this paper is an effort at a narrative account of the evolution of our ancestors from proto-hominoid times to the earliest fully human stage.

THE CURRENT STATUS OF THE GESTURAL THEORY OF LANGUAGE ORIGIN

One of the most plausible glottogonic models assumes that the initial form of language was gestural, in the sense that the propositional, predicative, or reporting functions were based on gestural signs, with vocal sounds serving much as they do nonhuman mammals, for the social communication of affect. The gestural theory was actively debated in the 18th century,40 although reference to gesticulation in connection with early language goes back another two millennia. In its older and simpler forms, the gestural theory shared with other glottogonic theories an ignorance of biological evolution and geochronology. Weak and strong versions can be distinguished. In the former, gesture is regarded as a very important or coequal aspect of early language, as in Kendon’s recent statement. 53 (1975:4): “Gestural language systems may be at least as fundamental as is speech,. . . at the very least, reportive communication in gestural form emerged concurrently.” The stronger version holds that for a long time gestural signs constituted the main body of language, with vocalization subordinate, although no reasonable advocates of the gestural theory claim that man was mute during the postulated gestural phase of language evolution. The hominids from the beginning of their separate evolutionary career must have been using vocal calls for social communication. In a modem, updated formulation of the gestural theory, the behavioral emergent, propositional language, is seen to have followed the line of least biological resistance, such that its initial appearance and early development did not require new anatomical structures or behavior patterns previously impossible. That modern chimpanzees can acquire modest gesture-language competence without undergoing further biological evolution is therefore powerful evidence for the plausibility of the gestural pathway to language in the early h~minids;’~ however, a good case can be made for the gestural theory on the basis of much other evidence. In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates observes that sign-language could be used if man lacked speech.80 Augustine, in his Confessions (ca. A.D. 400), 2 discussing language acquisition in young children, notes that adults point at things, directing attention toward them, at the same time uttering words which the child then associates with these ostensive definitions. “I saw and remembered what they called what they would point . . . that they meant this thing and no other was plain from the motion of their body, the natural language, as it were, of all nations, expressed by the countenance, glances of the eyes, gestures of the limbs, and tones of the voice, indicating the affections of the mind, as it pursues, possesses, rejects, or shuns.” That deictic gesture is the natural path to propositionality is an old idea, so that it is not strange that when the Biblical account of Adam’s acquisition of language came to be questioned, the possibility of gesture as a primordial form of language was considered. By the sixteenth century, literary and philosophical references to sign-language were numerous, including the use of gesture-language among the deaf and in certain monasteries. Rabelais satirizes sign-language in Puntugruel (1567), 83 and Bacon discusses such signing in The Advancement of Learning (1605).’ The revival of drama and the study of rhetoric led to a reexamination of Greek and Roman writings about

Language, Communication, Chimpanzees [and Comments and Reply]

In the last ten years, entirely new experiments have been undertaken in the field of animal communication. The works of Allen and Beatrice Gardner with the chimpanzee Washoe and David and Ann Premack with Sarah should have held the attention of linguists and semiologists more than they have up to now. It is from this standpoint that they are examined here.

A Social-Technological Model for the Evolution of Language [and Comments and Reply]

This paper develops a model for the evolution of language that is consistent with semanticist and pragmaticist interpretations of the forms and functions of language and the processes of language acquisition and language change. The proximate aspect of the model emphasizes the social contexts of language acquisition and language change; its adaptive aspect emphasizes the sociobiological concept of communication as social manipulation. Both aspects emphasize the relationship between subsistence technology and social behavior. Specifically, the model suggests that the stages of evolution of the lexical and syntactical systems roughly parallel the stages of their acquisition; that primitive lexical forms of reference and request first arose among the earliest hominids for food location and food sharing in relation to extractive foraging on embedded foods; that simple syntax first arose among Homo erectus for encoding regulatory rules and procedures concerning recruitment, aggregation, and coordination of workers at resource sites in relation to big-game hunting; and that complex syntax arose among H. sapiens for encoding procedures for predicting resource distributions and constitutive rules for classifying relationships and performing ritual transformations of statuses and relationships, e.g., kinship terminological systems and rules of exogamy in relation to subsistence specialization.

Rethinking Culture: A Project for Current Anthropologists [and Comments and Reply]

Culture as a concept has not been fully examined by the profession for some time. This article is a challenge to carry out this examination. It begins by discussing problems in the use of the concept and then goes on to suggest a new way of looking at culture: as a cultural pool, analogous to the gene pool (both culture and genes being forms of storing and retrieving information), from which each individual, each dyad, each group draws its particular body of culture; and as information coded twice, once in the brain and once externally, in language, stone, writing, repetitive behavior, and social institutions. It examines the implications of this view of culture for ethnography, comparative studies, and the study of evolution.

Hominid Bipedalism: Independent Evidence for the Food-Carrying Theory

Habitual food carrying has been suggested as a possible major factor in making bipedal locomotion biologically advantageous so that it was selected for in early hominid evolution. This speculation, supported by slight observations of captive macaques, has now acquired greater plausibility from four recent independent reports of wild and semi-feral bipedal, food-carrying apes and monkeys from the Congo, Tanganyika, Japan, and a Puerto Rican monkey colony. The most striking evidence of the relationship between food-transport and bipedal walking comes from a troop of Japanese monkeys where the locomotor habit emerged as part of a chain of new behaviors initiated with a changed food supply.

chapter 1 – Language Origin Theories

Publisher Summary This survey of the history of language origin theories must end in inconclusive fashion, primarily because it has been compiled at a time when the literature relating to the topic has reached the proportions of a flood of new and only slowly digestible information. It seems clear that the work on language capabilities in apes has been one of the important developments triggering the reopening of the problem. The work with apes and language has made it possible, for the first time, to manipulate factors in the learning of a first language in a way that would be quite unethical if the subjects would have been human children. The profoundly deaf are a population in which language can be investigated without necessarily equating language with speech, but deaf childrens acquisition of language cannot be endlessly tampered with in a manner acceptable with chimpanzee subjects. There are many possible practical educational and therapeutic spin-offs from the language work with chimpanzees.

Sapienization and Speech [and Comments and Reply]

Middle Pleistocene erectus skulls differ from ours in fifteen discrete traits, primary among which are their smaller cranial capacities, flatter and more strongly constructed braincases, larger and more anteriorly projecting faces, and inflected mastoid processes. Back to 40,000 years ago all fossil hominids are of the sapiens desing, while all those clearly older show the erectus pattern. Except for their large brains, Neandertals are of the erectus type. The sapiens differences (many of them mal-adaptive in themselves) follow directly, for biomechanical reasons, from an elongation of the pharynx and indicate full development of speech as the delivery system for laguage. The archeological record at the same time showns a worldwide change of increased tool complexity, geographical localization of desings, and increased rate of change. Faster and easier transmission of information by the vocal medium would increase culture content and would facilitate building flexible social organizations. The final step in developing vocal language would be the phonemic priciple of using meaningless sounds in meaningful combinations. This invention would transform vocalizations from calls with fixed meanings into a more flexible and rapid form of communication. Phonemic speech would spread by diffusion because all erectus would be able to use it to some degree. All populations would then select for the same vocal anatomy and consequent cranial changes that best facilitate speech behavior. This accounts for the speed of transformation and the continuity of line traits through it.

Pointing and Language

Publisher Summary Pointing gestures probably played an important part in the origin of language. Pointing also seems to be a significant factor in the emergence of language in the human infant. Evolutionary models for the development of language from gestural communication are handicapped by the fact that arm, hand, and finger signs are not prominent in the communicative behavior of wild non-human primates, although visual signals based on gaze, facial expression, posture, and body movement seem to be at least as important as vocal calls. In captivity, apes can acquire humanlike gestures even for use in language or language-like codes (such as ASL, the American Sign Language of the deaf), although acquisition by apes of vocal signs not already part of their species-specific vocal call system is extraordinarily difficult and very limited. For all higher primates, including man, it may be harder to establish noises as labels for environmental referents than visible signs.