evolutionary psychology

[The Grand Nudger]

Are you aware of the reports and the films of chimpanzee packs hunting, killing and eating monkeys, rocks and sticks as weapons, a cacophony of noise, a large and joyful ritual.  I don't think anyone is aware of an individual or one or two chimps displaying this behavior.

Red colobus, yeah, mostly adolescents.  They sometimes take antelope too.  It crushed the earlier supposition that human beings had descended from exclusively herbivorous species.  We now think that we inherited our dietary proclivities and attendant behaviors from a common ancestor between chimps and ourselves...this would place hunting much.... much..... further back than the development of language as it's been limited in thread.  Recall, it's something that you think chimpanzees don't have, and can't understand.  If we're limiting language as we have in thread, then this behavior... isn't an example of that behavior...and, in the process, we've argued against our own contention.  

There is a contemporary human analog, though.  Coursing hare.  A prehistoric analog could have been border raids and body snatching.  We've been doing stuff like this for nearly two million years.  All of the difficulties in placing language between anatomic and full modernity repeat themselves, but now play out over the course of millions of inexplicable years rather than tens of thousands or a hundred thousand.

It's for reasons like these, and more, that we don't think language is specific to human animals alone, and that we don't think that human language is an adaptation to hunting, to say nothing of considering language the prime factor in human development. We communicate primarily with each other about each other, early hominids weren't frequent hunters, much of the communicating world never turned into the world of civilization or society and all of the surviving hunter gatherer analogs are the literal opposite of contemporary civilization. They don't even reflect early civilization. Language is great, I like words. It's definitely a neat trick. It just doesn't seem to do what you think it does. In specific cases, it lacks the utility you think it has. There's a reason that obligate predators are quiet. It's called ears. Now, mind you, that doesn't help those poor little monkeys, since they've been driven up a tree with nowhere else to go and they're no match for the individual chimps anyway. A vert pit. Seal clubbing.

In the land of pure speculation, we might posit that given some undetermined amount of time and a persistent tool culture like our own megafauna specialists they could get around to hunting more antelope, say, or even bigger game. The ones that do take antelope might already be showing their prowess....and it's clear that they wouldn't have to start talking like we talk to accomplish that both from their own existent example and our archaeological record. It's also clear, again from their own existent example, our own, and our record...that hunting and communicating doesn't necessarily lead to human language or human civilization.