well thank you thank you very much and they thanked the inviters the the organizer of the conference for having invited me to come and speak to your conference today on this rather grand subject of what does it mean to be human I'm an archaeologist working closely also with anthropologists and geneticists and we have our own I suppose particular take on this question and in the first half of my trip today I'll be presenting some of the recent developments in our understanding of human evolution and what it means to be human which I guess so are not controversial a part of the established to view now about what what occurred over the last six million years ago since we diverged from our shared ancestor with the chimpanzee and then the latter part of my talk are going to be talking about some my own views about diversification within our own particular species of Homo sapiens our own particular type of human and that relates to the evolution of language and more specifically were and how it may have influenced our thinking so let me let me start with our place in nature going back to four four billion years between four and 4.5 billion years with the evolution of life and in this immense diversity that has evolved principally by natural selection and we here we are represented here by Charles Darwin are just one of just a typical human I plucked at random for you I just one of multitude of species some still living many many now extinct if we look at that bit of that a wee bit more closely here we are on this branch here and we can see there our closest living relative the great apes chimpanzees bonobos gorillas and then a little bit more distant monkeys and other primates and then we can see our relationship to other mammals and reptiles and the birds and so forth now looking looking at that a little bit there bit more closely we have this little graph here showing our shared common ancestors so all we need to do go back to about 6 million years ago and we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees go back to 10 million years ago we shared a common ancestor with gorillas that's 15 with orangutans back to 30 with with Gibbons now depending on your perspective six million years might be not very long or vast amounts of time now from my ponder view as an archaeologist I think six million years ago is a vast amount of time so in effect there's 12 million years of evolutionary time between ourselves and our closest living relative the chimpanzees six million years of evolution in the hominid direction and six million years of evolution in the chimpanzee direction so reflecting on the the last talk we heard it's not surprising is it that there seems to be a vast gulf in behavior in thought and language capabilities we now tell set between ourselves and chimpanzees or any other living species you might gather because it's been this vast such a vast evolution between them so much more challenging question I think it's what is it what is the difference between ourselves and the other species of Homo and the species of Ostrava the scenes that lived during that period of six million years and especially perhaps over the last Georgia half took 250,000 years they're the ones I think we need to look at and ask did they have language did they have intellect do they have insights did they have abstract thoughts and it's those that we need to compare with ourselves if it's hard to think what does it mean to be human now you can see here that all of these characters down here Masuya defenses and a lady erectus and so forth sits within the genus Homo as such they're all humans so if you ask what does it mean to be human or if you are score doesn't mean to be human the question I'll put back to you is but what type of human what type of human until he met I talked about Homo neanderthalensis they talked about Homo erectus a tall mat Homo sapiens because there are all types of humans now let's look at that a little bit more a little bit more closely and look at some of that diversity in humaneness that sits within the genus Homo but first just think about that how that genus was defined if we go back to Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century he was the first one that define the term homo sapiens in fact he he identified four particular types of a minute sapiens the Europeans obviously at top of the pile governed by laws what could be better than that and they are the Americans near customs okay okay it's on there on the edge of savagery that is okay make customs okay Africans impulse Asians opinions okay so that was his hierarchy of but nevertheless never less he's defining a single species Homo sapiens okay recognizing different ways of being human within that particular particular species later in the 18th century blumenbach I attempted I suppose what would call these days a rather more scientific empirical approach by looking at the particular anatomical features of of humans and of course remember at that time we didn't have any fossil record of human evolution or we had living Homo sapiens and he looked at what are the particular anatomical features of humans that distinguish ourselves from other all other animals and he identified small canines having a chain a short mandible this large round dome skull and erect posture walking battle ISM and in essence those particular characteristics remain as defining features of the Homo genus Venus although as we'll find out the money they're much debated now in 1856 I've got it more complicated for people I get human evolution well for everybody because just as Darwin was publishing his origin species the first Neanderthal fossils were found in yonder valley provokes a huge debate provoked huge debates about human antiquity and what belongs or did not belong within the homogeneous and what belonged or not within the species of Homo sapiens because these bones the fossils were both remarkably similar term sapiens it notably evidence for an erect posture evidence for reduced addition I know an evidence for a large brain for skull size that was not significantly smaller than Homo sapiens but some differences large large brow ridges slightly different posture much more robust and I led to radically different views as I'm sure you're familiar so here's to be constructions Marcin bills through construction 1909 there's your savage brutal Neanderthal and so Arthur keeps reconstruction of nineteen thirteen of them rather more contemplative thinking both of those were based on exactly the same skeletal remains exactly the same sweet remains okay interpreted extremely differently and debates discussion about the Neanderthals on relationships Homo sapiens have gone on throughout up until the present day and I will deed return to that big debate towards the end of my talk with my own particular views of similarities and differences now a step forward perhaps was taken in the nineteen fifties with Ernest Mayer who had a rather simple definition of hominids caused by 1950s weird rather more evidence from the fossil record having been found first Austra petha scenes Homo erectus seen in the forests and so forth he said old hominids the key characters him whether there are bipeds walked on two legs and hence only on two legs all the time obligatory and hence they fitted in the Homo genus and he suggested a a linear sequence going for what he called homo transplants are lenses which are the off strip a the scenes that today we wouldn't include within home at all through Homo erectus to Homo sapiens and here was in effect in embedding home in the end toss in Homo sapiens at the time and they shifted the definition of homo away from the mythology of anatomy behavioral adaptation it was actually walking on two legs so it made the difference it also implied that human evolution followed a linear trajectory and of course this is still the in many people's minds the not just the popular but the actual view of human evolution one that have formed I followed a linear direction and indeed a progressive direction as you can see by the gradual upright stance that nice firm straight back which clearly is showing something more profound about what its meaning to be human we now know today this is profoundly wrong profoundly wrong and misleading about the nature of human evolution and about the nature of what it means to be what it means to be human so in the 1960s Louis Leakey contributed this argument working in Olduvai Gorge found some really famous fossils which seven rh8 that he argued belonged within the homogeneous algorithms belonged around two million years ago and also they're associated with the earliest known stone artifacts these older one chopper tools so he believed these these homo or these species that he put into homo will make his own tools and this become known as Homo habilis now today we think that Association is very dubious there's no clear association between these Homo habilis fossils and the actual manufacturing tools either other hominids at the time they have been doing the same and also this really stretched the morphological definition of homo the homo habilis the jaw remains here these are very much parallel two sides to the to the mandible as are diverging and many anatomist today would simply not put these within home they describe Homo habilis as an osteopath the scene so it's a very substantial ongoing debate but by the 7th 1970s human evolution had been recognized not as a linear progression a linear march to homo sapiens but as a branching tree with quite a high taxonomic diversity within the Homo genus so here we see coming from this hominin ancestor and would have the evolution to the chimpanzees coming on at different routes here group of the ostraca the scenes at the base here son evolving to what we call parents the post which are very bustling came highly specialized animals for living on fairly dry vegetation and then in the other direction the auspices became more grassle with Homo habilis here that some would stay as a nostril to the scene and then moving into the eras of Homo defined by bipedalism enlarged brain Ridge East in Titian and so forth and on here we've got the homo erectus homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis recognizing a home in e and talents s and Homo sapiens shared a common ancestor that father 2,000 years ago and then the Antos became extinct about 35,000 years ago leaving just Homo sapiens as a sole representative of our genus on the planets often mistakingly often mistaking people to think that we are the only type of human we're not we're just there any type of human that still survives today well anyway it then all became much more complicated since year 2000 perhaps there's been two very significant trends in human evolution studies that are challenging further our notion of humanists and what it means to be human one is further discoveries of fossil remains not surprising that there's still a ongoing discovery of new types of fossils a most notable was Homo floresiensis in the year 2000 on the little island of Flores in Indonesia and then in 2010 the Denisovans soy there's a typo that should be an eye the Denisovans in 2010 principally identified by genetics although there are small amounts of fossil remains Herman llld in 2016 and then just a couple of months ago the announcement of probably another type of human human news or news on insists pilot difficult pronounced in 2016 so that's been one chance more discoveries and as you can see on here these have all been living pretty recent times now dating these fossils is quite definite difficult but we could go back to perhaps 150 thousand years ago and there'd be one two three four five at least types of humans living on the planet all being different types of humans maybe more a second great trend in human even studies at the time has been the extraction of ancient DNA this has been has revolutionized not just humour Lucian but archaeology as a whole it's often described as a third great revolution in priesthood studies the second coming beam the first having been established of discipline at the end of 19th century the second radiocarbon dating and this is now actually transforming what we understand about the human the human past but I'd be able to extract DNA out of human bones whether fossils or unfossilized bones and then comparing the complete genomes with those from other bones or from from living folk form living humans and that's shown interbreeding between Homo sapiens how many intelligences and their Denisovans to say the Denisovans haven't been given a species known some people referred to them as homo Denisova but they tend to have avoided that designation in the identification so let's just take a lot some of the looks of these of different ways of being human it's conferences ask what does it mean to be human well one way of being human is being a Homo habilis type of human if we want to put it into that genus and that Homo habilis type of human was living on the African savannah in probably quite large cooperative groups he said the brain size about about a third of ours maybe a little bit more not that much larger than a chimpanzee it was quite variable within that probably making stone tools probably showing quite high degree of cooperation and most likely again reflecting the last talk showing quite a bit of empathy understanding polysomes theory of mind to be able to live cooperatively with in these very challenging challenging landscapes but they may not have been that significant from other australopithecines are possibly early types of Homo at that particular time by two men years ago a quite different type of human had evolved that many would place at the start of the Homo genus this is some many people would place this as the first in homogeneity but yes you can see by this line it's is Homo erectus and most likely a collection of multiple different homo species some would separate Homo erectus into Homo erectus and Homo ergaster erectus being an Asian variant Homo ergaster having been Africans varying that evolved out now this is a different way of being human this way of being human means that you're fully bipedal bipedal in the same way that we as bipedal walking two legs in an obligate manner you can see that by the from the hip the knee and the foot joints this particular specimen is the remains of a fully 15 year old boy from East Turkana one of the best preserved fossil skeletons ever come from it's a record had a brain size at least half of that of modern humans but in the size of what would today be of a fairly young child maybe field and five-year-old but other fully evolved adult human so it's quite strange type of human to that much smaller brain capacity but nevertheless at a physique that was the same essentially same as ours living in even larger social groups engaging in big-game hunting we know that in in both sites in in Africa and in Europe these Homo erectus are hunting large mammals and that presumably involved quite high degrees of of cooperation the shift to bipedalism had huge significance for social Asians in a simplistic summary effectively that made the pelvis having to be fairly narrow narrow birth canal now began giving birth to basically hugely immature infants you know for a mammal of our size gestation period should be similar eighteen months or two years rather than nine months so we give birth to hugely immature children and much of the brain development occurs outside the womb in a cultural world and those babies need huge amount of looking after and care and hence huge amount of cultural transmission so many many people would put the emergence of social relations that were used to in humans today at this time because of this this impact of bipedalism on the on life history now homo homo ergaster or rectus what everyone called him dispersed out of africa now why did it do that well it may have been just with dispersing as other large mammals dispersed after Africa and the sequence of climate changes generally as climate has become former in interglacials we have a dispersal out of Africa when it becomes colder animals dispersed back into Africa but have a aghast I went a long way into Europe into Asia right down into into into Java and it was making or some community those were making very sophisticated stone tools these are the by faces or hand axes you can see some of them are beautifully made very symmetrical some of them are very large they're very small they're probably accent butchery tools but needs a huge amount of design there's a nice aesthetic about these it's a hugely challenging skill to make make these hand axes so if you're talking about any measure of intelligence rental out I think you can take these off as having it okay remarkably and entirely different to the sorts of technology made by any living primate today or any other animal now in Europe the Homo erectus probably involved in two species called Homo heidelbergensis so possibly evolving in Africa dispersing again and then about four hundred thousand years ago we have the parents or the Neanderthals or Homo neanderthalensis found as fossils in the Near East and in and in Europe and surviving for about four hundred thousand years ago when extinct about thirty five thousand years or so ago okay modern humans we've only been around on the planet for about three hundred thousand years ago and I think is pretty unlikely we're going to match that Homo neanderthalensis longevity as the way we're treating the planet and where we're going about but that's a different story so Neanderthals astonishing type of human brain size the same if not bigger than ours okay if you take it take into ratio with the body mass probably a little bit smaller but in absolute size a bit larger than its brain size living in hugely challenging environmental conditions in both tundra-like environments and then also adapting to living in relatively integration and warm like environments making some extraordinary sophisticate stone tools notice Li the level white technology this is a really complex technology to make you can see it's using a piece of stone flaking it to make a what's known as a core preparing it very carefully and when the one a single blow removing a flake that is in the shape of an arrowhead that can then be be hafted very few modern flint Nappers can replicate the skill with this and it's been done on a routine basis by the end of terms those are burying some of their dead a question either bearing some other dead it's question whether they're putting grave goods with them I think it's very unlikely but they're certainly bearing some of the deads dead in within caves not many but some this is the famous Kabara barrel of sixty five thousand years ago well that's much been much debated by archaeologists as to why they're burying the dead one view is it's a bit of a smelly corpse we need to get other way because they're going to cause disease another view is hey that's my mum that's my dad I loved I cared for that person I don't see their bones are ravaged by highness I don't see them decay I'm going to bury them because I cared for them we know neon toes were caring people we've got many examples or some examples at least when Anders has heard broken bones lots of American bones which then healed they could have only have healed by having been cared for by by others so they've got very strong social groups another view is it was all about symbolism belief in an afterlife and so forth I don't I don't taking you that bus that's one particular view they would be game hunters hunting bison horse possibly mammoths hugely dangerous tasks using their short thrusting Spears that they had are not surprising many of the gentiles do indeed have had bone fractures and injuries of the type that comes with close physical contact with animals such as rodeo riders and so forth they they were using some pigments we have black manganese in lot of mental science so they seem to been using that for some sort of body painting or maybe processing skins and in the last few years have been argued that they're also painting on cave walls using red pigment this is within the cave art of Europe that is normally associated just with Homo sapiens but there's been arguments now that some of the marks on the walls non-figurative date back to earlier than sixty thousand years ago and hence would have been made by Neanderthals but it's very sparse evidence so if they're doing that is very rare and I think it's unquestionable that had a sophisticated form of communication a type of language now why is that well they've got these great big brains brains are really expensive organisms you then get them for free if you've got a big brain you're using it for something now we know that they're using their brains to adapt to these different landscapes from making these stone artifacts for building their social relations with an upright posture the evolved vocal tract hardly any different to our own there's large brains it's inconceivable they could have existed adapted survived without a sophisticated form of communication quite the nature that communication I'll leave and I'll come back to later on but I want to tell you one rather thing about the Neanderthals which I think is really important they started making turn stone tools like this probably at around 350 20,000 years ago as well as well as making range of other forms over the next three hundred thousand years climates changed landscapes changed huge amount of change they carried on making exactly the same sort of swing tools what we don't see in outer cells is any sense of cultural change let alone cultural progress they were very good at doing some things and heck they just kept on doing them year in year out glacial interglacial it's a very interesting very interesting reflection at neon times why was cultural their their sophisticated culture with great technical skill why did it remain so stable for such a long period of time but let me move on swiftly to some other types of humans he's a good one hello flora flora census discovered in 2003 on this little island of Flores in this in this cave here in Indonesia he's only get to Flores by doing some form of sea crossing it's not clear whether it was a deliberate sea crossing using boats or whether a rafted either intentionally or accidentally and a number of individuals were found within the sediments of this cave and you can see here Homer florensis is a tiny tall sort of human it's definitely a human the morphology of this of the skull puts it into Homo but standing just a metre tall half the heights of Homo sapiens short legs slightly dropping shoulders other anatomic features that are a little bit different to homo and make great more similar to the Ostrava the scenes this was a shock to the anthropological community nobody had seen this coming at all and as it made men even knows had lots of political controversies and lots of debates is this just a pathological human puzzle Jim Earth unlikely there several individuals is it Homo erectus I got Flores and then went through a pair of dwarfing as other large mammals do when they live on on on Islands is it not strip is a scene that dispersed around Africa not much earlier are then evolved into these human features much debated unresolved my view is Homo erectus that's undergone dwarfism living on a living Island but wow there's a type of human that's different way of being a human being home a florist's florensis and then in 2010 I think was a 10 another type human was found nobody expected this either heaven an Aldi this isn't South Africa and South Africa we knew we had earlier Ostrava the seasons and we know we've got Homo sapiens by at least a hundred thousand users her ago and then then this cave here at least 15 individuals and it's thought there's a lot more there were found of another type of human homo nail D now this is little bit like I'm a fluorescence is in that it shows some homo and some other 15 characteristics it's relatively small pulley size of urn of a small human today um probably the most notable feature is his huge hands these huge fingers clearly an adaptation to possibly climbing trees scrabbling over rocks and so forth it has it has bipedal of characteristics but it clearly was climbing as well no the most debated thing about Herman now LD was to debate two things one is its date okay quite difficult to to identify here it's being suggested where are we that it's from about from about 350,000 to about 200,000 well we don't know it's sometime in the last five hundred thousand years that's one debate the other one is how on earth did they get into this chamber at the back here how did they get there there's 15 there now the current entrance I've not I've not been to this particular cave but the current entrance is going down through chambers here is pitch pitch black when you get down there crawling on your stomach squeezing through that it's called the Superman crawl because you have to go through apparently with her arm up like that then you've got to climb over that what's known as a dragon's back and slide down on this tiny little crack here and to get into the back what are they doing in there how they're getting in there now you might think well it's a high under den this is a den of carnivores and the trick as with your species they're killing them here the team that that's not the case these and these fossil remains they're not Nord they've got no chew marks on and you've got none of the other is no other as far as I understand no other types of creatures down in here that would suggest it's a carnivore den so they're getting in there themselves but it's been one strain of argument that this is deposition of the dead but they are taking their dead and they deliberately take him down through this and the disposing and they're in the back ok that's one view another view is that these are a bunch of terrified Herman LD escaping from carnivores and they went in there to hide they just couldn't get out again they don't they're I tend to favor that one I don't think there's much deliberate parents of going back that way right move on quickly homeowners instace defined as year this is these are the doctor from a bunch of skeletal remains found in a big cave here on the island of Luzon in the Philippines and these again have characteristics that have homo features and often within features the different references different and LD it's been argued it's been published now this is a new type of homo on this island and then we have Denisovans Denisova it's a cave in Siberia which was inhabited by both the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago to these 50,000 years ago when they took took one of the finger bones from there to look at the ancient DNA they found the DNA was not at me and at ours it was a nod of humans it was a different type of homo that was described as homo that would describe this Denisovan absolutely distinct and no nobody's question this that this is a nother type of homo living contemporary with Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis and only from the few skeletal remains that that exists it looks like it's got quite robust teeth robust jaws that were yet to get any image of the Denisovans well then Homo sapiens I can't really say where they're living because we're living all over the world now okay how much sapiens our species the earliest known come from Africa up until few years ago they dated to around 200,000 years ago from East Africa the omeka bush finds here and the head who finds from ethiopia with the distinctive characteristics of homo sapiens as opposed to Neanderthals erectus was so forth the vertical front of the skull heavily domed reduce chin reduced brow Ridge and so forth I've been remarkably a few years ago a deep olerude and morocco some homo sapien scales there that nobody ever questioned there are Homo sapiens were read ated to 300,000 years ago so how many sapiens is now thought to go right back to 300,000 years ago now Homer Tatum may go back to 30 thousand years ago what we've seen the ARCA record from three hundred thousand two hundred thousand years ago is not much change it's that is that almost monotony that we've got over from herim erectus Holub against his knee under sentences and then around 100 thousand years ago we start seeing some quite dramatic changes in the office record they are most reflected in South Africa at a site to of blombo's cave here's me in blombo's cave rather lot many years ago now looking at this remark was typically data about 70,000 years ago from where the first complex symbolic art has come these are engraved pieces of ochre with geometric patterns on the first bead necklaces huge amounts of red ochre and Ranger of new types of tools then also at Pinnacle Point cave further around the coast we've also got huge amount of ochre being used implying painting of bodies of artifacts oka cranes and so forth and then soon after that we get the big dispersal Out of Africa now in fact Homo sapiens an moved out of Africa on several occasions we got dispersals probably from 120,000 years ago but from 60,000 years ago there seems to be a really substantial dispersal Out of Africa that took Homo sapiens not only into Europe into East Asia but also into Australia and also right across the Bering Straits and all the way down through the Americas then turtle to Fogo by ten thousand years ago just remarkable dispersal through some of the most challenging environments needed constant change of adaptation lifestyles on the way just phenomenal something that Homo erectus never never undertook and we know we now know that in increasing detail about multiple dispersions out so we're getting deep complicated pattern that now let's let's look at a little bit more here on the race ship between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans here we've got dispersed about Africa some time around 60,000 years ago into Europe into East Asian to Australia and and and the Far East we know that these three species Homo sapiens are those Homo sapiens diversified into into various different groups then the Soviets Neanderthals we all shared a common ancestor around 450,000 years ago there was a major split then one line go to homo sapiens and one going to Denisovans and the under-12 which then spit again around 300,000 years ago into these two lineages Denisovans and the end of tars and Homo sapiens what we also now know is interbreeding so art of these splits could there was interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and hence the the majority of youth no audio VG will be carrying in to tell genes allowed to hear between one and four percent of Neanderthal genes and there was interbreeding between one humans in our voices of a of a group moving into Papua New Guinea with the Denisovans and Papua New Guineans today have something like five or six percent then the Soviet genes so again this challenge is what it means to be humans because we are mixed with mixed bits in yonder towel and mix a bit Homo sapiens bits of Denisovans they might be other bits of mix who you know in us so a mix where were a whole mixture but I want to move on swiftly foemen is to look at what happened to Homo sapiens after hundred thousand years ago now everything I've been talking about so far I've been happening in the context of global climate change there's going from about 800,000 years ago showing interglacials glacial periods into glacial glacial periods and so forth dramatic climate change and that's the period when we see this huge stability in Matera culture and not a great much progression material culture where we are today is in the Holocene the Holocene started soon after 12,000 years ago as a long period of warm climate now the Neanderthals had gone extinct and have had all other types of homo had gone extinct by 13 maybe 15,000 years ago Homo sapiens is the early human to have survived the last ice age this population continues to grow and it did something quite remarkable by 40,000 years ago Homo sapiens were making figurative art not only in Europe but also in Australia or so in thee or also in the in the forest and then within the Holocene this long period of warm stable climate that were still enjoying culture began to change the origin of farming around 10,000 years ago the early civilizations around 5,000 years ago the Industrial Revolution in the in the in the 19th century and so on so forth entered into the digital digital age and say for that living today just a remarkable culture what we call this acculturation effect because culture is building on it's building on learning in the past unlike that gate stability we see whether it's in chimpanzee technology and the understand technology and we're now living this remarkable the cultural diversity so again asking what does it mean to be human well what type of Homo sapiens all different beliefs lifestyles just just truly remarkable there's four key questions that this pose is what is why are we the only Homo sapiens left in the world today what's that why were we the only hope type of homo able to colonized Australia and the Americas why did our species after a hundred thousand years ago not before just capability compulsion for this constant innovation concert culture change that is now probably way out of control in doing such damage to our planets and why is this expressed through such cultural diversity well we can see perhaps a threshold at around soon after hundred thousand years ago with emergence of these this art symbolism and this dispersal Out of Africa it's not with the origin of Homo sapiens it's within Homo sapiens we have behaviorally modern humans extensive use symbols rapid culture change and what I call cognitive fluidity and then Homo sapiens prior to that showing a much more cultural stability much likely in the end of tars and so forth now some argue that it's were the population threshold being crossed which that's loud and great a mix of ideas and so forth and they think that's right I think in lots of parts of the world in the recent past Homer Sables lived at very low population densities and the some places Mientus who are high population densities some argue was a genetic change for cognition ah the origins of consciousness saw fear of - so forth that can't be true you got all that intelligent behavior by Homo erectus Neanderthals Samar's argue was a cultural invention my own view is that we're seeing a key stage in the development of language at this stage now even now I'm going to skip through quite as languages complex phenomena broadly people put into kazoo categories there's a phenomenon of words there's phenomenon grammar of course you all know that they're made diverse and complex within them and there's different views about the emergence of language some argue it's a very gradual slow incremental model that the austra path scenes and Homo habilis and Homo erectus they all had a little bits of language and was just gradually getting more complex through time others argue for a catastrophic model that right through until Homo sapiens alone language a little different to what we see st. chimpanzees today with all those constraints that were quite rightfully pointed out earlier and then there was some catastrophic event that gave us language to do others have more of a punctuated model I very much follow the punctuated model and just to briefly summarize I think we could see this in three stages we've got the australopithecines with primate like cools and then we've got this pre behaving in modern Homo sapiens neanderthalensis homo erectus a fourth with what I've described as a type of complex communication that is holistic based on phrases that uses multi modal a lot of body gesture facial expression dance and so forth got she's musical components into it like our language listed a memetic and manipulative very sophisticated form of communication and then Homo sapiens with compositional language so this would be the this this holistic manipulative multimodal musical type of communication art described in my book of singing the undertones a relative thick set of utterances with complex semantic meanings expressing complex thoughts that could ask questions and so forth used for a current situation events moderated by very pitched melody rhythm to ants meaning and emotion but limited degree of compositionality limited use of words so I think words is the critical thing now in the end of tars and other humans as I've described my 1996 book a long time ago now but still hold to these views had a different type of intelligence to modern humans different type in terms of chimpanzees in the areas of their understanding the physics of the world or understanding this sociality of the world on so NASA struck I think they're just like us they had insights they had concepts they understand the mechanics of the world and what they weren't able to do so much with bring these different domains together and then we're very much a partitioned our partition mind I've justified that in various publications I think the invention of words Chan changed that being words are fundamental right of the concepts that we hold enables under heart communication and transforms a nature perception and thoughts and what I'd argue and this is of course my own particular views rather established via human evolution is a group of Homo sapiens in Africa around a hundred thousand years ago inventive use of words so this last stage of language wasn't an evolved thing was a piece culture and what words were able to do was to break down that previously modular mind because concepts provide you those building blocks for more complex thoughts than the evolved mind itself can can hold and so we have two types of complex language that described in the scene Intel's modern humans with composition language Neanderthals and cream on humans with this music like sophisticated communication I refer this as cognate flora T in terms of that with using words especially we can come up with all sorts of ideas and concepts that in the end stars are nothing that couldn't just ever have imagined because they'd rather constrained by the type of language capabilities so to summarize and and that that enabled the dispersal so to summarize what does it mean to be human well if we quit being human with being a member of the Homo genus then there's not pulll ways of being human there's lots of lots of it we've revel in that diversity if we equate being human with being Homo sapiens our species then we can talk about being human with and without compositional language with conversational language we live in a world of cultural change of an of super Velva Majan a ssin of a dimensions unattached by the by the earlier homo sapiens because was drove the cognitive fluidity that drove the cultural innovation I had to rush through those last parts because I realized hordes going on but so what I've given you today is no view of the recent events on the sonne evolution on their own particular views about language and it's significant for defining ourselves at human I hope you found that interest and thank you for your time you you
