Inferring language from non-linguistic artifacts
In this week’s lecture and associated readings we have been looking at human evolution, with the aim of understanding the ecology that shaped the evolution of our species, but also in the hope that we might be able to glean some clues about when language evolved. Unfortunately, writing is a very recent invention, and spoken languages don’t leave direct traces in the archaeological record. However, it might be possible to make inferences about when language evolved, or whether some hominid population had language, if we can infer the presence of language from something that does show up in the archaeological record – the reading for this tutorial focuses on tools, in the lecture I’ll talk about potentially symbolic behaviours like ochre, beads, art etc.
The question for this week’s tutorial is therefore: can we infer the presence (or absence) of language from the presence (or absence) of certain types of material culture in the archaeological record? Specifically, can we infer the presence of language from the presence of (a particular type of) tools in the archaeological record. The paper you will read, Morgan et al. (2015), takes a rather innovative experimental approach to try to answer this question, reporting a set of experimental studies where people acquire and transmit knowledge of how to make tools under different constraints on what kinds of communication are allowed. Read the paper, think about the following questions, and discuss in the tutorial.
Questions:
Morgan, T., Uomini, N., Rendell, L., et al. (2015). Experimental evidence for the co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language. Nature Communications, 6, 6029. Available online on the University network
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