RE: Languages
January 13, 2023 at 11:29 am
(This post was last modified: January 13, 2023 at 11:41 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(January 13, 2023 at 10:55 am)tjdisc Wrote: “The evidence could have pointed to a recent origin for languages, it just doesn't.”
Actually it does but it just requires a very basic level of intellectual honesty in assessing the historical record.
The historical record doesn't inform us of whether or not a given candidate could speak, rather, whether or not they could write. We were writing alot earlier than previously believed.
To determine whether or not a candidate could speak, or probably did, we look at the spinal cord and mandible. Both are involved in the production of human languages, which is to say that we know given setups are physically capable of speech because we are, with that setup. Further, talking leaves marks on your bones from the development of muscles in your lower jaw.
So, say we dig up a skull and it looks like it had a beefy enough spinal cord to facilitate all the things that go into talking (it's more than we think, since we don't really think to do it, lol)..and it had a jaw with all the right connections, and the connecting points show evidence of use consistent with speech...it;s a safe bet you found a talker.
In fact, if we wanted to reject that, we'd have to come up with a wildly ludicrous explanation that acknowledges -that- it looks like the candidate could and did talk, but some other set of hilarious and unrelated processes managed to effect exactly the same evidence without producing said outcome. We'd be left wondering why they didn't talk..when they could have, and in the case of hss and some cuzzos..when they left all sorts of other evidence that strongly suggests™ they had alot of shit to talk about. Art, musical instruments, ritual sites, distributed and transferred tech......the sun rising in the morning...the weather... IMO, it's just too much. That's probably why the most rapid hypothesis for the development of human language take it back 40kya, right around or after full modernity. If we weren't talking before then, we certainly were after then, and have been since. At 40kya, the hss population was already geographically distributed, so it's unlikely that they spoke the same language - just as time, distance, and social or cultural isolation/segregation continues to give rise to differences in speech today.
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