Tea at Trianon: Development of Language in Early Humans

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Development of Language in Early Humans

From Neuroscience News:

A new paper by Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University proposes an original unifying explanation for the physiological, behavioral and cultural evolution of the human species, from its first appearance about two million years ago, to the agricultural revolution (around 10,000 BCE).
According to the paper, humans developed as hunters of large animals, causing their ultimate extinction. As they adapted to hunting small, swift prey animals, humans developed higher cognitive abilities, evidenced by the most obvious evolutionary change – the growth of brain volume from 650cc to 1,500cc. To date, no unifying explanation has been proposed for the major phenomena in human prehistory.
The novel theory was published in Quaternary Journal.
In recent years more and more evidence has been accumulated to the effect that humans were a major factor in the extinction of large animals, and consequently had to adapt to hunting smaller game, first in Africa and later in all other parts of the world. In Africa, 2.6 million years ago, when humans first emerged, the average size of land mammals was close to 500kg. Just before the advent of agriculture this figure had decreased by over 90% – down to several tens of kg. (Read more.)

From The Conversation:

Cave bears were giant plant eating bears that roamed Europe and northern Asia, and went extinct around 25 thousand years ago. They hibernated in caves during the winter. This was a dangerous time, as those which had failed to fatten up enough during the summer would not survive hibernation.

As a result, many caves across Europe and northern Asia are now filled with the bones of cave bears, each one containing potentially thousands of individuals. In our new study, we analysed a bone from a cave in the Caucasus Mountains.

Our team recovered the genome from a 360,000-year-old cave bear, revealing new details of the animals’ evolutionary history and almost rewriting their entire evolutionary tree. As well as what it can tell us about cave bear evolution, this discovery is a breakthrough for the field of ancient DNA.

February 2021 was an important month for the study of palaeogenomes – the analysis of genomes from extinct species. Two studies were published just one day apart, one reporting the oldest genome from a permafrost environment – from a 1.2 million year old mammoth tooth – and our new research, reporting the oldest genome from a non-permafrost environment. (Read more.)

What about Neanderthals? From SciNews:

The linguistic capacities in Neanderthals have long been an area of active research and debate among scientists, albeit with little resolution. The last two decades have seen increasing archaeological discoveries documenting complex behaviors in this sister species to Homo sapiens. These have been linked to the possible presence of language, since it seems reasonable to suggest that such behaviors require the presence of a complex and efficient oral communication system. Nevertheless, a different point of view maintains that the distinctive features of human language, absent in other organisms, include a symbolic element as well as a recursive syntactic process called merge. This latter process, at its simplest, uses two syntactic elements and assembles them to form a set and is argued to be exclusive to Homo sapiens and to have appeared no earlier than 100,000 years ago.

Tracing the presence of symbolism and syntactic processes in the course of human evolution currently lies outside the realm of possibility in paleontology. Nevertheless, the study of human fossils can prove key to determining whether past human species, and in particular the Neanderthals, possessed the anatomy necessary to produce and perceive an oral communication system as complex and efficient as human speech, the usual vehicle for language. In other words, although paleontology cannot study the evolution of the ‘software’ of language it can contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the ‘hardware’ of speech.

“For decades, one of the central questions in human evolutionary studies has been whether the human form of communication, spoken language, was also present in any other species of human ancestor, especially the Neanderthals,” said Professor Juan Luis Arsuaga, a researcher at the Centro Mixto (UCM-ISCIII) de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos and the Departamento de Geodinámica at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Using high-resolution CT scans, Professor Arsuaga and his colleagues created 3D models of the ear structures of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and the Sima de los Huesos hominins, considered ancestors of the later Neanderthals. They then entered the new data into a software-based model, developed in the field of auditory bioengineering, to estimate the hearing abilities up to 5 kHz, which encompasses most of the frequency range of modern human speech sounds. Compared with the Sima de los Huesos hominins, Neanderthals showed slightly better hearing between 4-5 kHz, resembling modern humans more closely. (Read more.)