Daniel L. Everett: How Language Began. Homo erectus and the Origin of Language

[Applause] thank you very much for having me and I apologize that I don't speak German as a linguist I always embarrassed that I don't speak languages where I'm talking but I don't and that's that's that but as I was thinking about this place three of my greatest heroes were born very near here the founder of American anthropology Franz boas his first job was at the museum of ethnography in Berlin the founder of American linguistics Edward Sapir was born very close by and the founder of Brazilian anthropology Kurt uncle else but he became known as Kurt namond a Jew who was the greatest Explorer ever of the Amazon and why there's never been a movie about him I have no idea because he traveled thousands of miles by canoe alone and took word-lists a hundred years ago of the peat aha that are good also another german explorer two hundred years ago than Martius visited the peter han took a wordless that's fairly accurate the only thing he did that was funny was he has for the phrase come with us but actually what the phrase he has means stay here so I can see 200 years ago this little misunderstanding that took place but but so much and in linguistics originated in Germany and and American linguistics owes a huge debt and American anthropology and Brazilian anthropology to to this very area so it's quite an honor to be here so that's their go so that's the book I just have to promote that as no that's all you have to see that so the summary of the talk just to let you know what I'm gonna be talking about the greatest technology ever invented was language and I'm not using invention as a metaphor I mean invented an invention is technology that emerges from a culture there's no one person who invents anything there are single people who get associated with an invention but these inventions are created by the zeitgeist by the culture by what is going at the time and some person like Thomas Edison is lucky enough to pick out the light bulb if in fact he is that's why there's so much dispute about who invented what because it's just part of the culture Homo erectus invented language at least 1 million years ago I think closer to 1.8 million years ago and the and earth all's and sapiens therefore would have been born into a linguistic world so I'm going to give you two definitions here at the top which are controversial but I don't care communication is the transfer of information that's broad enough so that it could mean that a thermostat can communicate which is fine with me and language is the transfer of information via symbols so if an animal can learn symbols by that definition they have language but we would expect to see them invent symbols if they really had the capacity for language it's interesting that even today Universal grammar advocates there's a recent article out where the author says it has widely been assumed by linguists that there's a single computational operation merge which is unique to language in other words what's unique to human language is structure but he says in my paper I show that the operation label not merge the evolutionary novelty for this person is an operation that basically is a symbolic creation as symbols so I'm glad to see that people are coming around to this view so I think one of the reasons that people have thought that language was much later is because they've been looking in the wrong places many are most archaeologists investigating the evidence for early language have been sold on the formalist idea that grammar is the defining feature of language so you find archaeologists trying to find correlations between tool complexity and then assuming grammatical complexity or they believe that symbols are important but they're only found in special locations like artwork I think those are both wrong grammar is insufficient because grammar just the fact that there's a grammar doesn't mean there's a language because DNA has a grammar there are a lot of different domains that have grammars that have structural structural operations that are not language it's also unnecessary because there are non hierarchical non recursive grammars if I'm right many people would say I'm not that you can even illustrate say in English a famous movie title eat drink man woman there's no recursion there's no hierarchy there but everybody knows what we're talking about or a sign that you see in the States you drink you drive you go to jail that is non recursive discourse and everybody understands that just fine nevertheless important to information transfer and value and values grammar becomes more and more important as information becomes more complex so this is basically what happens the all creatures have indexes which are physical connections between form and meanings so footprints are physical index of smells our physical index is smoke is a physical index of fire those are recognized by every living creature icons are intentional and they're non arbitrary their physical resemblances so a painting is an icon a sculpture is an icon they show the ability to represent something based on physical resemblance not physical connection and then finally the most complicated is a symbol which has a form and a meaning but more than that I won't go into all the details but symbols are actually fairly complex but the most important thing to remember on a symbol is they arise by convention by culture they don't arise any other way also duality of patterning that just means that we take meaningless items to make meaningful items so take CA TS I'll go into this Katz and English C means nothing a means nothing T means nothing s means nothing Katz mean something so the ability to take things that don't mean anything make things that do mean something such as cymbals this is a crucial component of language and I'm not the one who discovered that that's been known for a while compositionality is the ability to put things together and make larger meanings so the and boy and big and ran can go together to get the big boy ran so so these are very important parts and there are different kinds of grammars I'll skip that for now so indexes there's a good index of a fire all creatures recognize indexes so what yeah so what are some of the creatures around so we have this clade of primates so we are these Catering's so if you go to the if you go to the New World and see monkeys their nostrils point out or up all monkeys all Apes of the new world including us our nostrils point down actually if you're if a human's nostrils grew up in the Amazon they might have a hard time breathing because it brings so much butt so it's very nice for us that they could point down so our closest relatives outside of the homo family or the pan family chimpanzees and bonobos it is often said that we share 97 to 98% of our DNA with them I don't know what that means I don't think anybody has a good idea of what that means because we can share I could share 100% of my letters with another language with my sounds and they would be nothing alike it's just how you how you mix them all up and humanity this is where we really don't know as much as we'd like to know so if you look at this we have art of Pythias for example which is about 7 million years old but we don't know if it goes where I have it there or whether it goes down lower we really don't know its place very well and when we get down to Denis Denis ovens and the and earth all sapiens erectus I think there's a little too much elaboration there and I don't think those species work as well-defined as as we are often led to believe it doesn't matter for my story I just think that the evidence suggests that they weren't as much as different as we would think so this is what I would propose so you basically have erectus which led to Neanderthals and sapiens so icons so all human ancestors recognized indexes because every creature in the world recognized indexes when do we first see the appearance of icons in the record in the archaeological record we see it not with humans but with art with Australopithecus africanus three million years ago we find in a cave a little 2 inch by 3 inch sorry I can't remember what that's in centimeters are but 2 inch by 3 inch this little guy it's on display currently at the British Museum what does that look like to you looks like a smiley face right like a t-shirt that you make a t-shirt of it that that that little thing couldn't have gotten caught between their toes it's a little too big to get caught between even the art their toes it doesn't match the stones that are found in the cave where it was discovered it had to have been carried there and the explanation that most people give is it looked like a face they saw that they recognized that we don't find this with any other ape except humans so this is the first example of an icon and there is about would have been about this tall able to tear me limb from limb with a ferocious bite but also extremely smart and completely upright they walked as upright as we do Australopithecus when do we see the first symbol starting to appear in the archaeological record well symbols this is not the first symbol this is my intellectual hero Charles Sanders purse who was probably the greatest mind to ever be produced in the United States and died penniless and unemployed even though he started off quite well but he invented a lot of different things he invented formal logic before Frigga and in fact there are references at the time that his formal logic was superior he invented semiotics or the theory of science before so sewer he invented the American there's only one really American philosophy and that's pragmatism he invented it it became associated with William James he wrote William James that he didn't understand it and he had messed it all up so he changed the name to pragmatism he made many discoveries in mathematics chemistry geology astronomy and other fields he's the first person to figure out that the Milky Way rotates he was a specialist in geophysics and the first geophysics Institute in Germany was in Potsdam I just visited it today and he came to Germany to check his instruments because the best instruments were made in Germany I suspect he visited the Institute I was at today it was found that in 1874 and he was working about that time so I have a book coming out about him he's uh I write books about things I don't know much about so I can learn about them and hopefully by the time the books finished I'm not in the same state of ignorance I was when I started so language is much more complicated than is often presented it's to me the primary unit of language is not the sentence or the word it's the conversation I think that we didn't have language in the archaeological record until we had a conversation symbols were the beginning but symbols would never have arisen outside of conversations they could have only come about in conversations so we have meaning and lexical meaning phonetics the history of languages grammar psychology culture on top of all of that so language is quite a complicated thing which is one reason I'm not worried about robots learning language anytime soon they would have to at least be able to learn culture at the same time so purse actually predicts that indexes he didn't think it he wasn't thinking about evolution although he did read a lot of Darwin but he never made specific reference to evolutionary's writings but the indexes are more primitive in his system and he has something called icons which is what I mentioned which are less endless and zidon symbols so this is this is purses inadvertent prediction of the order of language evolution that we would go from simple indexes to complex symbols so this is our parents everybody does genealogy tests I did a genealogy to my wife and I did our genealogy she is 99% Northern European largely German I'm 97% european however she expected me to be like 40 percent Neanderthal and in fact she's seven percent Neanderthal and I'm three percent so I remind her of that but it doesn't really matter because ultimately we all go back to these people it's very funny when we make big differences about about race and historical Providence and all this stuff this is everybody's mom and dad that's where we came from so what are their what were they like physically they stood I should have put all this in anyway they stood about my height they're a little taller they weighed about a hundred and forty two 170 pounds they were the first creatures ever to do something that humans are the best in the world at which is persistence hunting do you know that we are capable of chasing to death almost any animal that lives any animal humans can run it to death because we can cool off quadrupeds cannot cool off they were overheat and died so if a human takes off after a deer they will eventually run it to death in fact there are still Indians in the Amazon of the plains that hunt this way I've worked with in the suya and kaya paw they had a brain of about 950 CCS on average Neanderthals had a brain of about fourteen hundred and fifty CCS modern humans have a range of 950 to 1300 1300 is closer to the average 950 is at the bottom end but look who had a 950 CC brain so the size of the brain and 9,000 CCS for a sperm oil so the size of the brain doesn't indicate intelligence it's the organization of the brain and and what you do with the brain they had a more primitive vocal apparatus but one of the facts that has come to light and since I've been giving talks about this our people who are working on the anatomical evolution of the human vocal apparatus say that until they thought that from my book that Homo erectus had language they didn't have an explanation for why the vocal apparatus began to evolve very rapidly at the time of Homo erectus it had a more primitive gene Fox p2 which is not a language gene by the way it's used for all sorts of things language is just one thing that meant that they would not have thought as quickly as us they would not have been as smart at us as us how smart were they nobody knows you'd have to really interview one of them to find out some people have suggested they would have compared roughly to the intelligence of an eight-year-old child you know I don't even know what eight-year-old children can can do a lot of stuff but they were the smartest creature in the history of the world when they came about no creature had ever been that smart think about gorillas and all the things that a gorilla can do or a chimpanzee they would have been far beyond any any other ape in their tech in their intellectual abilities and their cognitive abilities they were more successful than we have been they lasted almost two million years they overlapped with sapiens for a hundred and forty thousand years it could have been as much as three hundred and forty thousand years but we we appeared either two hundred thousand years ago or four hundred thousand years ago but whatever we're newcomers compared to Homo erectus somebody said why did they go extinct if they had language well the American Indian went nearly extinct and it had nothing to do with their ability to use relative clauses it had to do with genocide and one thing humans have always been good at is genocide and that could have been why they disappeared another suggestion is that homo sapiens were the first creatures to domesticate dogs and use dogs and hunting and that meant that no other creature could compete with them in hunting so maybe it was dogs but anyway they were more successful than we have been so we find later associated with Homo erectus another icon man you port and it gives us an idea of where their minds were this was found in Morocco four hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand years ago and they carried this around with them it certainly is a good likeness they also developed tools and their tools went through its different stages so the first stage are the old upon tools which would have been about 2.5 million years ago to 1.2 million years ago and if you're if you're not an expert they just look like rocks but in fact to make one of these takes roughly 500 hours of training for graduate students in the u.s. not easy then they upgraded and they made these at Julian tools and these are from 1.2 million one point six million to two hundred thousand years ago and you know who appeared two hundred thousand years ago we did but they didn't stop with those they made these levallois tools also these are mainly associated with Neanderthal but there does seem to be evidence that erectus used them as well these are very finely work tools and most archeologists believe that they could not have been produced without correcting one another they required not just imitation but correction what does correction require language there are also some four hundred thousand year old Spears found again here in Germany which is the when Darwin predicted that humans would have originated in Africa but ironically the first humans skeletons are you know of ancient humans were found in China and Indonesia and Germany but these Spears would have been used by erectus or very closely related at around the same time there are two kinds of Spears this is a throwing spear and we actually have four hundred and fifty thousand year old wooden Spears they were they lasted and this is a throwing spear they also had thrust Speirs which meant you had to run up to the mastodon and stick it with the spear there these are tough guys and these require these imply a hunting culture they imply a lot of planning and and use I mean wolves do hunt in packs but they don't make tools that require technical sophistication and training to use so these are more and more evidence for the culture of erectus the ability to plan then I started getting interested in this subject when I was in Israel a few years ago at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and I saw this artwork it said the oldest art known two hundred and fifty thousand years old and I said got a zero wrong there and it can only be twenty five thousand years I'm sure but no it's two hundred and fifty thousand years old and it's looks like a Venus it wasn't all carved some of it was carved and some of it was dyed so what happened here is that Homo erectus found something that reminded them of a human and we know that they already collected such things and they they made a few corrections to it to make it look more accurate and they there seems to be evidence for red dye on it and there's more and more evidence coming to light I hope to be part of a paper that will come out in a few months once we verified everything of erectus use of dyes here's an interest seven hundred and fifty thousand year old shell found in Java where there were intentional indentations probably with a shark's tooth held firmly without letting up so there was intention behind that they were they were doing something besides just scratching this shark extracted scratching the shell so here it is in my book I have this image and I have to get permission for every image that's in my book and there's only one person who owns the rights to this photo and he's a retired Dutch professor living in Amsterdam and I had to trace him down and get his written permission and get him to you know I said do you need to be paid and he said no I'm fine I said fine put that in writing you don't need to be paid so that later you don't come to me so then we have this fascinating settlement and in the Middle East every people erectus and sapiens originated in Eastern Africa and they migrated out and at that time the Sahara Desert was not a desert but was a very green forest and the climate was very different and they came out through the Middle East so we find erectus early erectus sapiens and Neanderthals settlements in modern-day Israel so this one guess urban Jakov is an erectus settlement and what do we find there we find that they had one part of the settlement that was used for the processing of plants one part of the settlement that was used for the processing of meats one part of the settlement that seemed to be a general living area this was a planned settlement they had organization they had planning they had hierarchical thinking to be able to produce these kinds of things most intriguing to me was the discovery which even today some archaeologists deny but the evidence is actually overwhelming that oceans were no barriers to erectus they sailed across oceans so this is a quote from a very good book on Paleolithic Stone Age seafarers Paleolithic books our ancestors have often been painted as unintelligent brutes however this simply is not the case evidence suggests that at least homo erectus and perhaps even pre erectus hominids were early seafarers based on this evidence it seems that our early ancestors were successful seafarers biological studies suggest that considerable numbers of founder populations so when we find evidence of erectus tools on an island there had to have been 2250 erectus arrived they're more or less the same time it's not just that one erectus got there we also know and I'll go into this that they didn't just wash ashore it would have been almost impossible some archaeologists suggest that they got there by tsunamis but when I talked to friends of mine who are earth scientists they say that's not how tsunamis work you know the tsunamis are pushing water to land and it is possible that afterwards some things flow out but most of the energy is towards the land and it is true that a few animals have made it but we don't find regular systematic colonization by humans waiting to ride tsunamis most people don't try to do that here's the book it's a very interesting book Allan Simmons the voyage to Flores Flores is the first irrefutable evidence we have of erectus and proned contemporary with erectus there's this creature called Homo floresiensis that are also popularly known as The Hobbit and it's really short and nobody's been able to figure out why they're so short were they an erectus that adapted to Island living were they a separate creature that many people today think that they did not evolve from erectus that they were separate creatures that made their own trip and their own sailing to to their but in any case a friend of mine who does field research a linguist in in New Guinea David Gill says that there are still stories of little creatures living in the jungle they don't think they're there anymore but they have texts so we think they died 40 to 18 thousand years ago but we don't know when they they died out so Flora's that you had that was the distance at that time this would have been 750 thousand years ago the distance to Flores was roughly this distance of the English Channel and the currents then and today around Flores are the some of the strongest in the world there's a large current called the Pacific through flow that means that if you just got on something and tried to float from Java to Flores you would actually be washed out to sea because the currents too strong for anything to float there we know that ancient elephants were you know stegun aunts who are able to get there but humans would not have been strong enough to swim through that current not to get 2240 there around the same time so here they are actually arriving in Flores when I when I did mice I was looking for pictures of Flores and this came up this is actually Flores and so I thought they this is probably not how they arrived but you know they got there another place Russian archaeological expeditions starting in 2004 have found evidence of Homo erectus populations on the island of Socotra and to me this is far more interesting because it's a hundred and fifty miles out to sea so they really had to build some sort of sturdy craft to get out there there's actually an anthropologist in his Austrian but lives in Australia Robert Bednarik who has built what he considers to be something that he built it with Oldowan tools a raft that will take 20 or 30 people across and carry water and so he knows that technically it was possible to be done and then Crete there's a lot of evidence that Homo erectus made it to Crete and not just through walking through land bridges a lot of people and they see this well the these things were all connected by land back then I've purposely chosen examples that were not connected by land 750 thousand years ago so erectus got to all these islands where they needed to have a large population to get the visible signs of culture we see there today and they didn't do this by just one of them falling off and grabbing a log and floating to the island what were their abilities we know that they could plan we see that from their settlements ocean travel tools and their persistence hunting they had culture what is culture that is a system of social roles of values and knowledge structures and and when we know that they had culture planning the tools what what is a what is a symbol then this is the thing that really is the crucial question when you see a tool in your garage what do you think of you think of what that tool can do but you also think of oh my god I'm going to have to work some more on Saturday or oh I remember when my wife and I were having a great time gardening no man ever said that but but you can see these symbols and they remind you they remind you of things because tools become symbols and one of the one of the problems with the thinking about symbols is that is this idea they had to occur in some very special environment and it's only when we see art that we have symbols but symbols are all around us whenever you have a culture just about everything here is a symbol of something so tools burial art evidence for convention but we they do have evidence for all of the standard kinds of symbols you would expect we find evidence of especially you know a stone axe of quartzite buried with a skeleton in Spain which seems to indicate that they did well I say it's buried but it was found with the skeleton and the evidence many many people interpret that to mean it was buried with it so a type of art so duality of patterning I've mentioned that you know you can take meaningless sounds and make meaningful things so how could they have come about let's just talk a little bit about their vocal apparatus what kinds of sounds could they have made very often when linguists are talking about the evolution of speech they talk about sounds were they capable of making sounds Homo erectus would have been roughly a talking gorilla they had the vocal apparatus that is much more similar to a gorilla they couldn't have made all the sounds we made the sounds they made would have sound more muffled does that mean they couldn't have language no it doesn't mean that at all there are a lot of people today that have speech impediments that can't make the same range of sounds we make but they certainly have language how many sounds do you need to have a language well think about a computer what can you say on a computer anything right I mean you can type anything that's why people get addicted to Facebook and everything but how many letters does a computer have it has two zero and one you have a binary digit language and those I would like to call the sounds of the computer zero and one that's how it interprets everything or that's how it presents information that is interpreted by the program that was created by a person with language you don't really need more than two sounds the more sounds you have the easier it is to remember words and distinguish words if you just have two sounds a lot of words are going to sound alike you can have paw and paw paw and Paw Paw Paw and Paw Paw Paw Paw Paw it gets boring after while you could add tones to it so you could have Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa you could hit but you add a few more sounds and you've got so what are the smallest numbers of sounds in the world's languages today that we know of they are pete aha which has three vowels and eight consonants if you're a man and three vowels and seven consonants if you're a woman and rota costs and Hawaiian Hawaiian has about 15 sounds pete aha then how's about twelve sounds plus two tones which gives it fourteen and rotor cost has eleven eleven sounds so we know you can have languages with eleven sounds did their grammars have to be complex no they could have been simply one simple following another just in the earlier examples I gave you from English eat drink man woman that works it's a movie title people seem to understand it I had somebody review my book who said oh I have no idea what that means I said but the point is you have to know the context to know what it means and apparently she never saw the movie so this is the other thing about we never we never say all that we mean and we never mean all that we say you wouldn't be speaking human language if you did so when politicians tell you I say what I mean and I mean what they're lying already because language doesn't work that way we we leave a lot of things unspecified and we let the cultural context fill it in so if I say she sat down Who am I talking about you only know who she is if you saw her come in or I've referred to her earlier and you can follow it so actually why do divorces happen in modern societies because language doesn't really work well I mean that's a you can tell that language of all because it doesn't work very well there just doesn't communicate as well as we would like it my wife and I have conversations sometimes and we realized that we didn't know what the other one was talking about we clearly didn't know what the other was talking about we have different cultural assumptions and although if I do figure out what she's talking about then I pretended that's what I was talking about but linearity is you just put these symbols in a row you get the basic ideas out there and you let context tell you what the difference is EEMA cessation and dark matter I'm gonna skip that I might come back to so this is a good book so what is what do I mean by culture culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles hierarchically structured knowledge domains and ranked values culture is dynamic and changing so we are in here demonstrating culture most Amazonian peoples that I know would never sit quiet what one person talks this wouldn't happen because they don't have the social role of audience and speaker and then when if you were to come up and start talking and I were sitting down then we would have switch roles we have these roles and it helps society to function well you couldn't have an exchange of information of this particular kind if everybody was talking it at once but also you know we have political roles but people shift roles so society is being in roles and more complex societies have more roles and more shifting between roles and and we have values and values have to be ranked so let's take the French I always like to pick on the French so the French like good food everybody would probably agree with that I don't know if all French like good food I can't imagine anybody who doesn't actually like good food and the French like to look good be in shape Americans also like good food and they also like to look good and be in shape but there's a difference Americans are not in as good a shape by and large if you look at them as as French people perhaps so let's just say that for French people just I have not tested this this is just an illustration good being in shape is more important than good food and for Americans good food is more important than being in shape so that would explain a lot right there even though they have the same value it's just just ranking those values differently can produce very different results and hierarchically structured knowledge it means that the things we know we we structure in particular ways so think of the word color and then think of the types of colors red is a type of color blue is a type of color so they they fit a diagram that looks like a tree so that they are all subordinate and then red has subtypes of red and it's well known in English that one of the difference between male and female speech is that women have more elaborate culture color hierarchies than men so no culture no symbols no symbols no language and we find that we find that erectus had culture plenty of evidence that they had symbols no reason to deny that they had language in fact somebody said so you're saying they must have had language I said no that I would never say they must have had language because that's how not how science works I'm saying that's the best explanation for all the things that they did and if you can think of a better one so it's been claimed that even standard European languages are fairly simple in the way people use them on a daily basis one of the greatest changes cultural changes in language that led to more language complexity is literacy as soon as we started writing our language started to get more complex we got a new function editing and telling people how to talk more effectively or write more effectively and we also had the ability to write far more complex sentences because you don't have to worry about remembering the front and the end you just read it and and you've got it there in front of you and by the way of talking about remembering the beginning and the end to be able to understand a sentence if you haven't read I'm sure you've all read a Mark Twain's essay on the German language and if you haven't you will laugh a lot but he learned German and he he did a year-long lecture tour in Germany and and lectured in German unlike me so there are g1 grammars in the world today those are grammars that just have symbols in linear order these are claims that have been made by me and by other people for other languages such as reality than Asia there are standard European languages which I would call g2 languages they have hierarchical structure but they don't seem some languages don't seem to have recursion if I can if what is recursion it's the ability to put a sentence let's say just to give a simple example inside another sentence or a noun phrase inside another noun phrase you put something inside something else so I saw John bill said that I saw John that's embedding but it's not recursion recursion is the ability to keep doing that so bill said that I saw John is just a simple example of embedding but bill said that I saw John who then saw Mary who saw bill and just keep going that's fairly good evidence that you've got recursion and and that's what I call a g3 language so we we seem to find evidence of all three of these languages which exhaust the possibilities in the world today a mathema mathematical linguist friend of mine said these are all touring equivalent languages which means that mathematically they're all the same but experientially they're not and in terms of the difficulty of inventing them they're not so it's another thing what are the limits of language are they given by grammar are they given by symbols are they given by culture so how many years ago 1962 Nobel Prize winning economist herb Simon wrote one of the most famous books of the 20th century one of famous articles on the architecture of complexity but my thesis has been that one path of the construction of complex systems is hierarchy so he says that our languages and our organizational cognitive organization becomes more complex as we have more information to transfer and he shows that this is found in nonhumans it's found in non living creature on living things the universe either it's a property of the mind or it's a actual property the universe seems to be organized hierarchically atoms are within you know so you get all this organization it's just a natural fact about the world so recursion this this complex ability that we use in English and German especially if we're writing is just a way it's a very effective tool for managing information there's no mystery to why it would be so common in the world's languages if you try to say Peter spoke the moon as green cheese but Peter spoke Mary spoke Bill spoke the moon as green cheese as opposed to Peter said that Mary said that Bill said that the moon is green cheese the Sun is hard to understand the first one is nearly impossible to understand so recursion organizes the information in a way that actually makes it easier to understand we've got complex information that's very good so another thing we need to avoid is how we think with how we talk very often people think that if I say that say the pita ha do not talk about the past that they can't think about the past but that's not the case they think about the past you I can show that fairly easily by interviewing them but they don't talk about the past it's like a cultural taboo think of all the things that are in your head right now because most of us our minds wander the whole time especially if you're sitting in a lecture you're thinking of other things and and but you wouldn't say those things out loud right now not because you can't think them but because it's just not good idea to say them right now so why did the rectus disappear they live for two million years they overlapped with sapiens for roughly a hundred and forty thousand years I've gone over some of the possible explanations when Columbus came to Americas he wiped out the tyno people of Hispaniola they had nothing to do with their language they just wiped them out and they were both homo sapiens and or did they disappear in a sense they may not have disappeared maybe we're just erectus so that they stayed with us did they talk the evidence suggests that they did the evidence suggests that they had all the characteristics the prerequisites for speech and they performed operations as a group that required speech that would have not been possible as far as most of us can think of through these accomplishments without language so this is another artist rendering of erectus I like this one best and I'll just conclude with some of the obvious changes in the face so they have the big brow ridges that we don't have those probably helped for shading their eyes nobody there therefore head went back farther a smaller brain but not a small brain their mouth came out more because they still had the ape-like parabolic dental arcade and that meant that they could produce fewer sounds but more than two and eventually our faces got flatter our skulls got thinner our brow ridges went away our forehead came forward and we became who we are today but those genetic changes have no implications for being able to speak or not being able to speak to have implications for greater intelligence and intelligence and speech are not the same so thank you very much and I'll see if there are questions [Applause] again thank you for a very fascinating talk you mentioned at one point that the invention of writing made it possible that language became more complex now in the context of language evolution it is kind of peculiar that most of the research darkness obviously on languages that do have wiring systems would you predict that if we looked at language who said as far as I know still exist so I do not have any lighting systems we could actually learn something kind of like interesting about the transition from the previous languages to languages at that is complex as like German what Mark Twain was complaining about the so my claim is not that only written languages are complex my claim is that once languages were written that facilitated complexity but there are still many languages of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world probably less than half are written and there they can be quite complex I work with in the Amazon in Mexico I've worked with languages all the languages I work with are complex some are complex in the sound system and some are complex in the grammar and their syntax so complexity is also different in fact there was a whole workshop that I think you were at where my son spoke on how to gauge complexity in natural language yes many thanks for your speech odd you said the brain is not a the brain is a part of the body and so I remembered a quote from Albert Chan yogi and he said the brain is not an organ of thinking but of survival I think that's more important to look to the function of this part of the body I think so but my question is another one what do you think are there more good arguments it's more possible to to think that the origins of language is mono Genesis or apology and others as for your studies what do you think what's more plausible is Error one origin or several it's more plausible to think there are many places of origin of language and that's an excellent question we first mentioned something about the brain so there's a wide range of solutions to thinking that creatures have evolved so you have jellyfish that have no brains and they do just fine our brains are basically a large amount of saturated fat that sits in our scope our brains are largely fat you put one on a griddle and it will just you know cook away very quickly but they take 20% of the calories that we consume and whether you're sleeping or standing or working out your brains eating 20% of your calories that's a huge investment it means we have to eat more humans are the only known creatures in the animal kingdom that get fat on an without being raised in a human home you know I have it the fat dog so but but chimpanzees in zoos have a have a body fat percentage of about 5% athletes often have a body fat percent human athletes of 15% so we we have a higher percentage of fat because we have to keep that food coming and building up fat is very useful for us because our brain just eat so many calories we have to eat more we're so why did we get brains survival I think that's I think that's right I think that in our environment the harshness of the environment all of these accomplishments happen during the great ice ages during the Pleistocene when the glaciers were coming and going and there was no you had to have cognitive plasticity for a creature like us it wasn't so some creatures developed the ability to live in the cold physically and they went off and stayed in the cold or they died other creatures have developed the ability to live in the heat we developed the ability to live anywhere under any circumstances and that's what our brain enabled us to do so we develop away from instincts and towards cognitive plasticity and that's one of the greatest functions our brain gives us that no other animals brain provides for them in quite the same way that's not to say that animals don't have cognitive plasticity I'll give you one example of an experiment done by an Israeli scientists so they've studied rats and rats on earth have a way of writing themselves when they fall over you push him over or whatever but they get up in a certain way so it was argued that that was an instinct that's how rats had to get up so they took them to outer space where that doesn't work that won't get you up they developed another way of getting up so they showed cognitive flexibility rats which we all know I mean there's about the only creatures rats and cockroaches are the only creatures that are successful as we are in happening the world thanks very much is this working ok you have probably all we're on the subject of animals you probably know a great deal more than I do about the various attempts that have been made to teach Apes to speak and I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about that given what you've told us about the you know the very early origins of language it seems to me clear the little that I've read that chimpanzees and even gorillas and certainly bonobos and chimpanzees they do use symbols and they recognize symbols so what are they missing that Homo erectus had that enabled a fairly complex language that despite all of the attempts that people have made nobody's quite succeeded in teaching a great ape they lacked a human brain they lacked a 950 CC brain so their brains are about 450 CCS so they can be taught individual symbols and there's a great deal of controversy on how much they can be taught beyond that if we take the most conservative view which is that they can learn a few symbols and no grammar that wouldn't have given them language per se but they are communicating linguistically if they're using symbols Homo erectus would have had to invent symbols not simply use symbols and they would have had to use them in ever more complex environments so we can't forget that this was the smartest creature that ever walked the earth and if we were eliminated and they came back it would once again be the smartest creature the in the world so their intellectual powers are not like any other animals the only animals that compared to them are us and we are better but we always think we're better you said you said that one of the stone tools with an age of nearly 250,000 years could be made only by help of communication by linguistic let's say lecturing or help by others let's say in a linguistic social way do you have any proof or why what do you infer that this kind of just they're going by our key archaeologists and what they've written which is the complexity of these tools which they teach them on a regular basis how to make these tools all three kinds of tools to archaeology graduate students and a lot of work can be done by imitating but the final set of tools really needs advice at least for modern humans that people don't seem to be able to learn those by imitating so these are actual experiments done and and that's the consensus among many archaeologists that those tools would have required like no no here's another interesting thing if I'm right and the and earth all's were born into a linguistic world we should see evidence for that among a Neanderthal and recently we've discovered Neanderthal paintings which is ironic because that's what most people claim to be the evidence of language and sapiens that we know that Neanderthals painted and we know that they had cultures so there's no reason they wouldn't have had language whatever reason they died out they were competing with us and they had bigger brains than we do so we don't know how their brains were organized relative to us but all these creatures we out competed but that doesn't mean that they didn't do complex tasks that required and if you're building a large settlement and one part is for plants and one part is for animals how do you make sure that that's what people do in those parts of these settlement you probably are going to tell a child or somebody to you know get over to this part to do that they could they can watch it I I have watched many Amazonian groups teach things to their children with without language so that they're just doing tasks and but there's always a time where the child wants to ask a question and that question can be the difference between understanding and not understanding what they're seeing so it's it's unlikely that they could have built boats without communicating at a fairly advanced level it's unlikely that they could have made some of these other things so what we're looking for is evidence for symbols and then evidence for planning evidence for culture evidence for complex cognition and we see all the signs for this in erectus behavior of speech I have learned was always connected with a certain development of a bone in the throat and as I know this was developed much later than the rector's lived so of course there was a communication with noises and whistles and all sorts of things people can do with their mouth also Japanese chimpanzees can do but as we understand speech so we need this certain element here in our throat so what is the and but you say language came before speech speech is secondary to language there are there are groups of people known today and I've done field work with them who can communicate just fine whistling or humming the peat aha and in another talk I would have film examples of the Peter haha communicating by humming and whistling so consonants and vowels are not even necessary for all Homo sapiens societies today but again if you have the ability to organize culture and come up with symbols you can express those through gestures or you can express those through vocal apparatus and but we know that the beginning of the rapid evolution of the human vocal apparatus was not with Homo sapiens which is unusual why do Homo sapiens have fully developed vocal apparatuses language had to precede that language comes before the evolution of the vocal apparatus so if you say that all Homo sapiens had modern vocal apparatuses somebody had language before they erectus is where we see the evolution of the vocal apparatus start to become more and more sapiens like and that the best explanation we have for that is they they got language and speech enhances the ability to use language no not necessarily so even if they only could make sounds that as long as they could distinguish the sounds they were making that's all they needed they don't they didn't need to make modern Homo sapiens so somebody said so you asked me one time so you're just saying they're talking gorillas that's exactly that's what we are - by the way we're talking Apes all of us and so they would have it so gorillas and chimps don't talk because they they lack the speech apparatus they don't talk because they lack the brain they don't have what's needed to invent symbols and transmit symbols um hi I've just come up from the cheap seats I when you described the the niche that homo erectus inhabited you know this language capacity social complexity feedback culture symbols that would seem to be a fairly good context in which something like teaching might arise now because it's teaching assumes a lot of the environment and published cognitive complexity is your theory does your theory have anything to say about how these symbols and culture are are passed on from one generation to the next well yes well when we say that when we say that the tools probably require correction and the boats required correction that's teaching how were those transmitted well there are many cultures today that are oral they don't have written language the pita ha don't even talk about the past so how is it that we have 300 year old records of them that shows their culture back then almost the same as it is today because they imitate and they talk to each other this is the way to do it why do I do it this way because that's the way to do it and and I mean that's the way most of us learn from our parents our parents your children irritate you and they keep asking why but why why you know shut up that's how you do it so so you don't have to have a full explanation you don't have to be able to answer the question why to be able to answer the questions how and what and instruct so yes I would one of the purposes of language would be to instruct quite understood at what moment and in what way the human being came from uttering sounds like laughing crying shrieking two words the articulation of words at this very moment when the the sound becomes sign becomes a meaning right so it's not actually that hard too much is made of the complexity of language so how did symbols come about well we have for example among groups of Brazil something called ritualized wailing or crying so people cry and it sounds a certain way when you're crying naturally but these groups have taken what was natural crying and they've stylized it and they have they have made it symbolic and it communicates things about coming and going so symbols originate like that as soon as you can make so so I have a story in the book about how the original you know words would have come about and you know let's say that a creature is sees a a saber-toothed cat run by they might uh tur something and it might make a sound and if somebody else hears that sound they might make that sound that sound can be passed along in reference to that experience and once you do that you have a word already for that and you can start to break it down into smaller bits and if you do that you have the components to make other words so I think people have made too much about the complexity of language because language is complex but the basic building blocks of it are not and and one of the things I do in the book which I don't have time to do here is to show how you can go from extremely simple starting points to very complicated grammars in a fairly easy set of steps it's all baby steps as soon as you learn that there's let's take John saw Mary John is John is in the subject slot so there's a slot saw is a slot a place where something goes and Mary is a slot where something goes in the first slot you can put words that refer to things in the second slot you can put words that refer to events and in the third slot you can put words that refer to things again these are fairly simple building blocks of grammar just slots and fillers and once you start to get this idea you can build any word you can build any sentence you know and you can actually then start to build these complex hierarchical understandings the understandings would have come first and then the sentences themselves Hey so I just reread on the nice handout here your your definition of culture and it made me think of subcultures and their language as well and I was wondering do you think that rather than language being used as a connecting device and communicating it can also be used to segregate and that made me think more of subcultures and then I was starting to think well isn't that maybe a fairly new thing that language would be used to segregate because it is kind of a luxury isn't it to be able to use language as a segregating tool well I think that humans have and many other animals have segregated since they've been around I I did write a book called language the cultural tool which is how it's used to do cultural tasks and those tasks can be to build communities or to destroy communities and you know so in the Bible the story of the Tower of Babel or Babel is God saw humans all spoke the same language so he took away the ability to understand them each other and so they developed all these new languages and my story is that God must not have been a very good linguist because he made humans much stronger by giving us this diversity so there is there is a sense of division when we don't speak the same language I mean it wouldn't it be nice if everybody spoke the same language well actually wouldn't be because then we lose our diversity we lose our ability to talk differently think differently identify ourselves what's dangerous is when it becomes warlike or violent and those of us descended from this part of the world know a lot about that but that's not the fault of language that's the fault of other things different kinds of values and every creature fears creatures that don't look like it and so I always tell people if you're in a meeting and everybody looks like you you're not in the right meeting you should be sure that everybody looks as different as possible in your meetings because you're not going to get new ideas if you talk to people who talk like you we talk like who we talk with we eat like who we eat with we think like who we think with so if everybody looks the same talks the same we're not going to get new ideas you have to be at least not new social ideas yeah if somebody could come up with a new invention like Facebook I talked about Facebook because I have left it many times it's like it's like Mark Twain said about smoking he says it's no problem quitting smoking I've quit many times seems to me that the main point in your argument was respect to the universal canarians it's usually understood is the role of recursion the role of the relatively corrosion oh right right this new difficulty for everybody I think to accept the rule or the importance of cultural background and of communication and even the world of symbols as the core of natural language think it's generally agreed the who's the point is that combination of symbols makes language and now gives three level three layers of combination just linear hierarchical and then with recursion I think it might be useful to distinguish between the possibility of recursion and the exploitation or use of recursion one might try to pin down the possibility that recursion is already complete implied by symbol hierarchical combination without making use of it in general cases so just combining sequences of attributes this way of recursion and it's difficult to invent a hierarchical language without this possibility so to make a distinction between the role of recursion as a possibility and the role in which the way in which it is exploited in more complex constructions might distinguish different layers of language all based on the same kind of Universal capacity yeah actually I make that point in my last three books I completely agree with you I I completely agree with that the pinna ha for example are fully capable of thinking recursively in fact I show evidence for this in their textual organization they have ideas within ideas and they talk about they they they bring things in in the text to relate in different ways so they clearly think recursively the the difference is if if recursion doesn't have to appear in a language it's not essential for language it's essential for thought but it's not essential for language so yes all people probably think recursively I haven't done experiments with everybody but I would be shocked if not every human could think recursively in fact there's a lot of evidence that animals think recursively as well so recursion of animals that think recurse yeah there's there's discussions of behaviors of deer and and cattle and other things when they're walking and they do tasks within tasks and subtasks that that seems to be a result of recursive thought so I think recursion predates us Charles purse said exactly what you said about symbols symbols imply recursion in fact they don't really imply it they require it they require recursive thinking because one symbol is always part of another symbol so so the difference between that and say Chomsky's claim is Chomsky didn't claim that recursion was just a matter of thought he didn't claim that recursion just a matter of symbols he doesn't even think symbols are that important but he thinks that his claim is that recursion is the fundamental building block of human language but if you can find a single language that doesn't need it it isn't the fundamental building block of human language it's just like saying all swans are white and you find a Black Swan yeah I might just come in there I was just wondering I was just trying to understand your argument about how culture pre predates language so you just said that if you find one example where the universal grammar hypothesis doesn't hold then of course it's not true but could you not just argue that say for example you study properties that are coming in every culture say for example you you care for the for the members of your cultural group or certain other properties that might in some sense be universal and study the you know the characteristics of language as a derived quantity and try to find universal aspects of that language which derive from the universal aspects that you have identified are common in every culture for example you know to care for the members of your cultural group so is that actually done that people say we study we try to find universal properties that cultures share and therefore we may derives or we may find some derived Universal properties of language yeah that's an extremely good question I will say that I I did not mean to imply the culture precedes language culture and language appeared together their symbiotic each one constructs and builds the other the idea of universals of human culture traces back to Adolph Bastian who was the employer of Franz Boas at the Museum of ethnography in Berlin who came up with the thesis of the psychic unity of mankind and he influenced Freud and Jung and Joseph Campbell who believes that there's a mono myth every culture partakes of the same mythic structures leve Strauss but I don't find any evidence for that actually and and I talked a lot about it in the book dark matter of the mind there are universals of caring and fear of death so it turns out that the human emotional spectrum the the parts of our brain their emotional centers are shared with just about every animal even reptiles even snakes from those emotional centers come needs and desires and things that please us so those are definitely it's like also we find that in our eyes we are easiest we're able to easier more easily perceive some colors than others that doesn't mean that all cultures have the same colors or that they have all the same emotions it has it means that some cultural values arise from biology other cultural values do not so you won't find any two identical cultures but you will find overlapping values but that's why I said that the crucial point is not whether they have the values but how they rank the values relative to that so so let's say that you believe that it's wrong to kill anyone but you believe that your country or your religion is higher than not killing anyone then in order to defend your religion or your country you might kill somebody even though you would agree that it's not right to kill people if you if not killing people is the highest thing then your religion and your country will never make you kill people you would be John Lennon but somebody killed him so not all not already shared that value so so it's a very good question these things are hard to tease apart that's why I have written a series of five books and another one coming where I've tried to lay out every aspect of this and as I go back I realize all the things I forgot to say so it's an ongoing project but many anthropologists would argue that cultures are there's no two identical cultures although they share values and I would agree with that but they organize their values differently I I reject the concept of human nature but I don't mean that humans don't have any genetic characteristics and you couldn't distinguish between a human and a dog I mean that there are no conceptual structures that humans are born with and I don't find evidence that but others others others disagree with that so so the research there's a lot of research required that's why more and more cognitive science too are trying to do cross-cultural research because in the talk I gave yesterday was was it only yesterday but it was on on how culture affects cognition and cognitive science and how people think differently because they were raised differently very short one just now you answered it's symbiotic culture and language asymptotic but in your slides you're right it's at one of them is emergent namely language is emergent from culture so can you clarify on that one because I mean wonder talk on this is a talk on language I also language and culture emerge from one another so that's correct but it's only part of the story your language helps you understand what you're trying to do it helps you codify it so you have to have some shared values knowledge and we've seen non linguistic creatures that do have that but I wouldn't call a culture because it's not that well developed and and that's because they don't have language so it's the combination of cognition the brain the ability to invent symbols and the ability to invent culture and all those things appearing at once and each one makes the other stronger we get smarter because we have language we get better at language because they have culture we get better at culture because we have language the more smarter these things cannot be separated except conceptually if and if I understand it studio right you're an adherent of the hypothesis it the merge function and know that the label function is prior to the merge function as a mr. Chomsky claimed so isn't quite the same because to merge it well to label something you have to compile to collate in a way some traits or phenomena or everything and maybe it's the same yes your paper this this claim is not mine this is from a Chomsky and linguist who does all the working out of why merges insufficient and without label we're no different from any other creature I said it's Elliott Murphy no it's not my claim I just love the fact that I already agree with it because they've discovered so I wrote him and I said you've discovered minimalist semiotics which is just bringing symbols into minimalism now his claim is that all most creatures can compile merge is found throughout the animal kingdom that's the part of the claim of his paper is that merge is not unique to humans and so it doesn't explain why were the only ones with language and the only thing that does is label which I already said by saying that's in Charles Sanders percent over a hundred years ago that symbols are what make language hey sorry another one I was just wondering you said us obviously its language evolves it becomes more complex and that some languages obviously don't have ways of talking about the past always are talking about the future would you say how far would you agree with this is quite a bold claim now all the less complex the language they're happy with the happier the speakers oh well my family had very small vocabularies and very simple grammar nobody was happy so I don't know that that I don't think that works very well there but I I don't see a correlation I think that in fact I would not say that the simpler the culture I don't even know what it means to say a cultures simple or and and any evaluating a language is simple it's difficult the pita ha have three vowels eight consonants and very simple syntax but they have incredibly complicated morphology the structure of words so in English how many forms does a word have Singh sang sung singing sings five that's it pathetic I mean we used to be German but then we forgot and we we lost all of our morphology English is a pidgin language and most of our boards come from French anyway but Spanish has thirty to forty different forms for every verb but pita ha has 65,000 forms for any verb at least so they have they have relatively complex words they're not past tense or future tense but it had you have to know whether the object you're talking about was above the water above the river or at the level of the river or whether was perpend it was horizontal or vertical all that has to be in the verb whether you saw it or whether you deduced it these are complicated things sorry I should have maybe made it a bit clearer I was referring mainly to the use of tenses and to I don't know if the piraha have the conditional phrase as well because obviously the conditional phrase would also be a means of expressing an alternative possible reality which could potentially make us unhappy thinking about it whereas if we can only think about what it is now and only talk about what is now and not what could be or what has been maybe we would be happier they do have ways of expressing conditionality but it's not in the syntax as we would normally think it they don't talk about the past not because they don't know about the past that's a never claim I made but because they don't talk about the past I mean so every Peter Hahn knows that I woke up today and I woke up yesterday but they don't have a word for yesterday they have a word for other day which could be tomorrow or it could be yesterday they have a word for big time which could be long ago or long in the future or water one they can say I come at big water which means I'll come on the Rivers high I come at low water I come on the rivers low or little water and that if the water is currently high and I say I come when the water is high that means I'm coming in a year so they can infer these kinds of things but I believe that they're happier and actually it's not my claim that they're happy I mean they they were in the majority the happiest people there's a documentary the grammar of happiness yeah that's that's great but where this came from was MIT faculty researchers coming to do research with me among the pita ha to test these claims we did experiments on recursion we did MIT Columbia UCLA Stanford I mean I've had a lot of people down testing these claims and so one of them said these are the happiest people I've ever seen I've never seen people this happy I said well how would you measure that and he said I just measure the time they spent smiling and laughing every person and then I measure the time Americans spent smiling and laughing and I know they're happier than Americans that's a behavioral definition of happiness and I will say that they're happy I don't see evidence of depression when I was a Christian and trying to convince them of the need for Jesus I told them a story of my stepmothers suicide which was very moving to me and I told them this long story and when I told that story in the States I always got you know people were upset and but the pinna ha burst out laughing and I said why are you laughing they said you people kill yourselves that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard and I've never seen evidence for depression among them either so you know I think that we have a tremendous amount to learn from them not because they like past tense but because their culture values focusing on what's going on right now no regrets you know I mean if you listen to John Lennon's words and imagine he could have been a an anthropologist working with some of the groups I worked with there are societies that are sort of like that just on that idea I think it's maybe a little bit dangerous to go that old make our language more simple and be happier I'm just thinking about your current president he can oh right exactly wonderful example yeah he basically has no language and he's very happy well I don't know if he's happy actually I think he's relatively unhappy deeply insecure person so maybe president McCrone can have a few good words with him if he understands to continue with this discussion of happiness and formulate a question concerning the concept of sexual selection that comes out of the question with a suggestion of the one that you may know think about namely when you get out these days it's only a time of two weeks if you go to Gorham or to the front of the book after midnight you will hear nightingales singing just for those two weeks at night and they have a very very complex song structure that has been analyzed by biologists by linguists sometimes also that comes with a rich recursive structure and also the interaction between the different nightingales that you see comes with a rich because of a structure and why do they do this it's more or less a matter of sexual selection this rich song repertoire your flexibility in responding to what another bird is saying in his song responding in a good way that convinces women female nothing gets not women sorry to weather flying weather flying over the city and listening to that they think oh wow that's a good what about sexual selection after midnight I thought you were going to talk about drunken teenagers but recursive ability probably goes down in direct proportion to the amount you've had to drink so that probably wouldn't work as well it's in fact the same with many species of birds and I was wondering you mentioned it yesterday you mentioned in your book when you think about the first human being who uses recursive sentences Senta embeddings or whatever that this would not have made a lot of sense in terms of say more effective communication or whatever but it might have impressed and I think we would all agree it must have impressed women that you are communicating your intelligence and there were also your Fitness in solving problems by using these complex and technical structures and there was wondering do you think that's an idea that is worth being pursued that sexual selection has played actually a significant role in developing these complex grammars or sexual selection plays a lot of roles that that do have to do with the development of culture and grammar but the illustration that I gave in the book was that if you I believe that recursion came about as part of general cognition therefore what you said makes sense but the example I was arguing against in the book is the idea that recursion is a genetic development in that case if you need a gene to do merge and you're the first person to have it the other people without the gene are not going to understand you it's not going to have much survival value at all but if you already have the cognitive ability because cognition is not limited to the genes for language but it's just general abilities and thinking and we we have gotten far better at things than animals so we're much more able to do recursion than a Nightingale because in addition to that we can insert symbols into the recursive structure and have a lot more going on so that example was simply to show that it doesn't make sense that merge came about from a genetic mutation but that it makes more sense to think of it as having come about through cognitive development in general thank you I would like to thank you for the interesting talk and for the discussion also to the people who have participated in the discussion thank you all also for coming to this event as Martin cost suggested I might mention that there's another event at the Free University on Thursday and I've learned I don't know in what context that micromanagement is not good so although I may have a general overview of what Dan is doing at what time while he's here I don't know when the talk will be that's the task of the people I don't know either so I hope I may it then also if you miss that opportunity then we'll return in for September its September to a huge event organised by the Senate and International Literature Festival yeah yeah so thank you very much again

Channel: Einstein Forum

Views: 5,105

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: Einstein Forum, Everett, Language

Id: 1hVijQZLEeM

Length: 86min 52sec (5212 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mortypoollink]

I can’t sleep how are you.

Lecture ends at 41m and it was really good.

He was well paced, clearly spoke, not dry (witty), compared concepts to common happenings, invoked some very applicable ideas.

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

In the lecture, knowledge from various disciplines - linguistics, archeology, biology, anthropology and neurosciences - is brought together to support the thesis that, contrary to popular belief, homo erectus already had biological and mental characteristics a million and a half years ago that indicated a Let talent in language close. Especially in view of his technological skills (such as the production of tools and even ocean-going boats), there are many indications that he actually spoke some kind of language. From this one can conclude that the Neanderthals and homo sapiens were born into an already linguistic world.

Daniel L. Everett went to Brazil in 1977 to serve the people of the Pirahã, but lost his Christian faith under the influence of their teachings. From 1978 he studied linguistics and anthropology at the University of Campinas in Brazil. 1989 to 1999 lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh, 2006 to 2010 at Illinois State University. Since 2010 professor at Bentley University Waltham. Numerous linguistic research trips to the indigenous peoples of Brazil. In 2017: How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention. Publications in German: The happiest people. Seven years with the Pirahã Indians on the Amazon (2010); The greatest invention of mankind. What my years in the Amazon taught me about the nature of language (2013).