Abstract
Rousseau offers a complex response to the Western philosophic tradition that finds the best and most natural way of life within civilization. Rousseau agrees with that tradition in regarding speech as the defining human characteristic, and in seeking to take nature as a guide for human life. He offers a novel theory of the origin and evolution of human languages, which enabled our ancestors to become human and then to develop the social and individual pathologies that plague us today. This chapter compares Rousseau’s conjectures with the findings in several fields of modern science that bear on human evolution. Those findings are consistent with all of the major themes in Rousseau’s account.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Clive Finlayson, The Improbable Primate, vii–xii.
- 2.
Modern scientists have treated upright posture or bipedalism as the defining characteristic of humans in the broadest sense of the term, although this has now been brought into question. See, for example, Klein , Human Career, 130, 729.
- 3.
In the Parts of Animals, Aristotle notes that human hands are a more versatile tool than the horns, talons, or claws of other animals (687a31–b5). He also characterizes our nails as protectors for the tips of the toes and fingers (687b22–25). But he does not even analogize nails to claws, let alone suggest that one developed from the other. In the Discourse, Rousseau signals his familiarity with Aristotle’s biological works by posing a problem worthy of “the Aristotles and Plinys of our century” (O.C., 3:123). See also Emile, O.C., 4:455, Bloom, 184 (mentioning Aristotle along with Pliny and Buffon ).
- 4.
Darwin himself concluded that “we shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species” (Origin of Species, chap. 14, 456). Similarly, a modern scientist maintains that “we have to recognize that species concepts are humanly produced categories which may or may not always work when compared with the reality of nature” (Chris Stringer, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth, 54). Evolutionary biologists often define a species with notable imprecision, as in this formulation: “a group (or population) of organisms that look more or less alike and that interbreed to produce fertile offspring” (Klein , Human Career, 1).
- 5.
See, for example, Daniel Dennett, Darwin ’s Dangerous Idea, 36; Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 305–07; G.E.R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought, 86–90; Marjorie Grene, A Portrait of Aristotle, 136–37.
- 6.
Arthur O. Lovejoy contends that the early modern focus on classifying biological species was heavily influenced by presuppositions about the scala naturae that can be traced back to one of two “modes of thought” found in Aristotle and in late medieval philosophy (The Great Chain of Being, 227–28). More dramatically, James Franklin suggests that Linnaeus’ system of static and discrete species was simply the result of filling in the abstract [Porphyry’s] Tree with the names of actual species (“Aristotle on Species Variation,” 251–52).
- 7.
Modern commentators who attribute to Aristotle the view that biological species are discrete and immutable sometimes refer to passages in the Organon and Metaphysics that do not in fact imply this conclusion. See, for example, Richard Sorabji, Necessity, Cause, and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory, 145–46. For refutations of the discrete-and-immutable interpretation, see, for example, Richard A. Richards, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis, 17–48; James G. Lennox, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology, 131–81; John S. Wilkins, Species: A History of the Idea, 15–21.
- 8.
It is only a hint because Rousseau does not say how much man’s conformation must have changed, or how.
- 9.
A modern myth that denies the existence of this practice is thoroughly debunked in Arthur M. Melzer , Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. Rousseau previously referred to “the faith that every Christian Philosopher owes to the Writings of Moses ,” and said that “Religion orders us to believe that God himself [drew] Men out of the state of Nature” (Inequality, O.C., 3:132, 133, emphasis added). In context, these statements do not imply that Rousseau himself is a Christian philosopher or one whose own thinking takes orders from religious dogma. In this passage, moreover, Rousseau says that Adam and Eve were not in the state of nature, which could help explain why he had said earlier that the state of nature may never have existed (ibid., 132, 123).
- 10.
I will reserve the term “speech” for compositional language, that is, the peculiarly human form of language in which a limited number of symbols, used according to grammatical rules, enable us to generate an unlimited number of expressions of unlimited complexity.
- 11.
Leo Strauss calls attention to this passage in which Platos and Xenocrateses are mentioned, but confines himself to pointing out its anti-Biblical implications (Natural Right and History, 267).
- 12.
A few pages before, Rousseau had seemed to identify his judges with the members of the prize committee at the Academy of Dijon (O.C., 3:131). But that passage is ambiguous, and almost certainly ironic.
- 13.
Years earlier, Rousseau had indicated that he had given considerable thought to the attack on writing in Plato’s Phaedrus (“Letter to Grimm About the Refutation of [Rousseau’s] Discourse [on the Sciences and the Arts] by M. Gautier” (1751), O.C., 3:64). The enormous influence of this passage in the Phaedrus is also reflected in his later writings. See, for example, Emile, O.C., 4:454, 643, Bloom, 184, 319.
- 14.
At the beginning of the Preface, Rousseau had called Plato and his Academy to mind by mentioning one of the inscriptions at Delphi and the statue of Glaucus . Compare Inequality, O.C., 3:122, with Phaedrus 229e and Republic 611b–d.
- 15.
Rousseau’s use of the term “faculty” does not imply that he accepted traditional teleological assumptions about human nature. Responding to a critic of the Discourse on Inequality, he vividly elaborated his own view:
[A]ccording to me society is natural to the human species as decrepitude is to the individual, and arts, Laws, Governments are necessary to Peoples as crutches are to the elderly. The whole difference is that the state of old age follows solely from the nature of man and that the state of society follows from the nature of the human race, not immediately as you say, but solely, as I have proved, with the help of certain external circumstances which could have existed or not existed, or could at least have arisen sooner or later, and consequently accelerated or retarded the progression. ( Letter to Philopolis , O.C., 3:232)
- 16.
The word Aristotle uses here for speech, logos , has a broad range of possible meanings. It can refer to something as simple as a word or utterance, or to something as complex as Homer ’s Iliad or Plato’s Timaeus. Rousseau probably read the Politics in Latin (which has no close equivalent to logos), presumably using a translation from which the epigraph to the Discourse was drawn. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any edition in which that passage matches the translation in Rousseau’s epigraph. Nor, I should add, does the epigraph match the translation given by Grotius in De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Cf. Diskurs über die Ungleichheit/Discours sur l’inégalité, ed. Heinrich Meier , 6n4 (noting that Grotius had quoted the same passage from Aristotle).
The first Latin translation of the Politics, by William of Moerbeke, renders logos in the statement at 1253a9–10 as ratio, which has the narrow focus on calculation and rationality that Rousseau would have wanted to avoid. This is the translation on which Thomas Aquinas relied, and it must have had enormous influence on the Scholastic tradition. Several later translations render logos in this statement as sermo or oratio, both of which refer primarily to ordinary speech. In any event, Rousseau effectively avoids associating himself with the kind of Aristotelianism that defines man as “the rational animal,” while indicating that he agrees with what Aristotle actually says, namely that man alone among the animals has speech.
- 17.
Eiper, which I have translated as “if indeed,” could also be taken to mean “if, as is the case.”
- 18.
Aristotle’s account of natural slavery at 1252a31–34 depends on the assumption that the relationship is beneficial for both parties. The only obvious and commonplace example of such a natural relationship is that of parent and child, an example that Rousseau acknowledges when he explains why the family is the only natural society (S.C., bk. 1, chap. 2). Rousseau could also point out that Aristotle describes the first community arising from the natural urge to reproduce only as a “coupling” like the ones we observe in other animals, and even in plants (1252a26–30). Aristotle’s account of natural slavery thus does not necessarily contradict Rousseau’s claim in the Discourse on Inequality that the community of mother and child is the most natural society and the only one that strictly and indisputably arises by nature.
- 19.
The qualifier “we say” (phamen) in this sentence suggests that Aristotle may be articulating a widely held view that he does not himself necessarily share.
- 20.
The primary meaning of the word used here for “household” (oikia) refers to a physical dwelling. Because Aristotle had earlier used the word in a context that clearly meant “household,” see 1252b10, that is presumably the way he is using it here. But the word can remind us that just as most houses are artificial, households come into being somewhat differently than human beings and horses do.
- 21.
Aristotle reminds us that extended families or villages can easily grow into tribes and nations bound together by kinship, without becoming cities (1252b19–22). This was obviously the most common—and most obviously natural—path of development.
- 22.
Once again, the qualifier “as we say” (hōs phamen) suggests that Aristotle may be articulating a commonly held belief about nature rather than confidently asserting the proposition himself.
- 23.
In the History of Animals, as well, Aristotle gives several examples of political animals: human beings, bees, wasps, ants, and cranes (488a7–11).
- 24.
Aristotle does, of course, point out that the nature of animals allows them to express through their voices what is pleasant and painful, whereas human speech reveals what is advantageous and harmful, and that human beings therefore perceive such things as good and bad, just and unjust (1253a10–18). This passage, however, does not say that the peculiarly human phenomenon of speech, which is beyond the natural capacity of other animals, itself arises by nature.
- 25.
A large study of genetic, environmental, and behavioral variation among distinct populations of orangutans has provided evidence that cultural differences explain much of the behavioral variation (Michael Krützen, et al., “Culture and Geographic Variation in Orangutan Behavior”).
- 26.
See, for example, Carel P. van Schaik , “The Costs and Benefits of Flexibility as an Expression of Behavioural Plasticity: A Primate Perspective.”
- 27.
Similarly, a male researcher reports that a female orangutan sought to have intercourse with him. When her advances were rejected, she refused to cooperate any further in his research (Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, 25).
- 28.
See Klein , Human Career, 94–96, and compare Rousseau’s discussion of the inadequacy of the reports available to him about great apes in the Discourse on Inequality (Note X, O.C., 3:208–14).
- 29.
The bonobos suggest yet another possibility. These highly social apes maintain unusually peaceful relations within groups and even between neighboring groups. This peacefulness is facilitated by frequent non-reproductive sexual contact. The variety of these contacts rivals or exceeds that in humans, involving individuals of all ages in almost every possible combination and position. The only “taboo” appears to be that mothers do not have sexual contact with their adult sons. Females develop stronger friendships with one another than males do with other males, and bonobo society appears to verge on matriarchy. See generally Takayoshi Kano, The Last Ape: Pygmy Chimpanzee Behavior and Ecology; Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting, Bonobo : The Forgotten Ape. There is no reason to think that any of our distant ancestors ever lived this way. Nor has human cultural evolution led to this way of life, at least not yet.
- 30.
See Robin I.M. Dunbar, “Brains on Two Legs: Group Size and the Evolution of Intelligence,” 270n4.
- 31.
“Rousseau and the Rediscovery of Human Nature,” 111. See also ibid., 135: “Ultimately, consideration of Rousseau’s scientific legacy has the paradoxical effect of suggesting a return to the ancient naturalism of Plato and Aristotle in preference to modern theories of human nature.”
- 32.
The Essay on the Origin of Languages offers an account of human evolution that largely parallels the account in the Discourse, but it begins with isolated family groups rather than with isolated individuals. This suggests that the factual accuracy of Rousseau’s depiction of nearly perfect isolation in the hypothesized pure state of nature is not crucial to his account of human nature.
- 33.
Moral Letters, lett. 5, O.C., 4:1109. Rousseau later put this same statement into the mouth of the Savoyard Vicar (Emile, O.C., 4:600, Bloom, 290).
- 34.
Emile, O.C., 4:488, 322, Bloom, 208, 92.
- 35.
See ibid., 491, Bloom, 212–13. In this passage, Rousseau implicitly acknowledges that some modifications of amour de soi can occur without the influence of social interactions. The two most obvious examples of such passions are natural pity (which extends to sensitive beings generally and is therefore not a social passion) and bare sexual desire.
- 36.
See, for example, ibid., 490–524, Bloom, 212–236.
- 37.
Masters purports to acknowledge that this is so, but nonetheless chooses to embrace unconfirmed speculations advanced by certain modern scientists (“Rediscovery,” 127–28).
- 38.
Masters ’ discussion of this body of research is quite thin. See ibid., 116–20. Leaving aside certain suggestions that Masters himself admits are speculative and controversial, his principal evidence is that “[h]appiness and reassurance are social cues that correspond to preprogrammed perceptual and motor responses in the human infant” (ibid., 120). He then leaps to the conclusion that the human central nervous system should be called a “social brain.” Rousseau, however, never denied that there is a biologically determined social relationship between mothers and their offspring, which is all that this evidence about infant behavior actually establishes. Nor did Rousseau ever deny that we have innate biological characteristics, which modern science has now more precisely identified in the structure of the brain, that enable us to have more complex social relationships than mothers have with their infant offspring. Rousseau, moreover, affirmatively maintained that environmental factors have caused physical changes to take place in our species (Essay, chap. 10, O.C., 5:407). His account of human evolution can accommodate the possibility that the human brain has been altered through natural selection in response to changes in the social environment, such as increases in the size of human social groups. That possibility, however, falls far short of showing that we are innately social in the way that many other animals are.
- 39.
See Masters , “Rediscovery,” 115, 118 (citing Dialogues and Emile, respectively).
- 40.
Characterizing Rousseau’s psychology as essentially Lockean is extremely dubious. See, for example, Terence Marshall , “Epistemology and Political Perception in the Case of Rousseau.” Masters infers Rousseau’s personal theological beliefs from statements attributed to a fictional Savoyard Vicar in the Emile (“Rediscovery,” 118 & n20), which Rousseau expressly declined to endorse.
- 41.
Perhaps science will someday uncover evidence that would cast serious doubt on Rousseau’s account. If, for example, we learned that humans are directly descended from a species that instinctively lived in political societies resembling those of the chimpanzees , one could plausibly argue that we are naturally social or political animals in a way that orangutans and gorillas are not. Such evidence might not be conclusive, given how extraordinarily adaptable human beings manifestly are, but it would at least suggest that we are instinctively political. No evidence of this kind has yet been discovered.
- 42.
John D. Balling and John H. Falk, “Development of Visual Preference for Natural Environments.”
- 43.
Rousseau had seen reports of such people (Emile, O.C., 4:572n, Bloom, 271n). There have indeed been peoples who relied on concepts like “one, two, several, many,” presumably because they got along just fine without a more advanced mathematics. See, for example, Darwin , Descent of Man, chap. 2, 1:23; A General Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. John Pinkerton, 16:35; Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, 197–98.
- 44.
The Essay probably began as a projected Note for the Discourse on Inequality. See Draft Preface, O.C., 3:373; Pierre-Maurice Masson , “Questions de Chronologie Rousseauiste,” 45–49. Although Rousseau never published the essay, it is a completed work that he expected to include in a collection of his writings (Emile, O.C., 4:672n, Bloom, 340n).
- 45.
The principal target of this critique was Rameau (Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language, 91–97). Rousseau, who was a successful composer and sophisticated musical theorist, would undoubtedly feel more than vindicated if he could return to hear some of the intellectually sophisticated atonal music composed during our own age.
- 46.
The word mœurs refers to customs or habits that have some kind of ethical or moral quality or effects.
- 47.
Hermogenes frequently associated with Socrates. See Plato, Phaedo 59b6–10; Xenophon , Apology of Socrates to the Jury; Xenophon, Symposium; Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.10. Socrates does not appear to have exercised any significant influence on Cratylus.
- 48.
It is now known that primitive peoples often make extensive use of onomatopoeia in the names they use for animals. They also use what might be called “sound synathesia,” which involves mapping a variable like size onto particular sounds, a practice that Socrates also suggests would have played a part in primitive name-giving. Experiments have shown that Anglophone subjects presented with a pair of words in the language of one of these peoples, along with a choice between two kinds of animal, can guess with a high degree of accuracy which name goes with which animal (Steven Mithen , The Singing Neanderthals, 169–72).
- 49.
Even someone who fails to appreciate the jokes in the Cratylus would presumably find it mildly amusing if someone diagnosed with Graves’ disease assumed that he was headed straight for the grave or if someone avoided playing baseball for fear of contracting Lou Gehrig’s disease.
- 50.
Socrates does not make this point directly, but he does point out that proper names, like “Theophilus,” are often assigned to children in the hope that they will turn out to be fitting. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, whose work is discussed in Chapter 2, offers an even more interesting and revealing example. When she first went to the Kalahari, she was given a name meaning “one who laughs” in the native language, apparently because the namegivers recognized that she laughed a lot because her heart was sad (A Million Years with You: A Memoir of Life Observed, 38).
- 51.
In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau alludes to an easy case like Socrates’ example of kings (O.C., 3:131–32), and then goes on to undertake a serious and lengthy investigation of the harder case.
- 52.
See, for example, chap. 2, O.C., 5:376; chap. 9, 405–06; chap. 10, 407–08.
- 53.
In the Emile, Rousseau develops this point in considerable detail (O.C., 4:382–97, Bloom, 134–43).
- 54.
See, for example, Karen McComb, et al., “Elephants Can Determine Ethnicity, Gender, and Age from Acoustic Cues in Human Voices.”
- 55.
See, for example, Paulo C. Simões-Lopes, et al., “Dolphin Interactions with the Mullet Artisanal Fishing on Southern Brazil: A Qualitative and Quantitative Approach”; Brian D. Smith, et al., “Catch Composition and Conservation Management of a Human-Dolphin Cooperative Cast-Net Fishery in the Ayeyarwady River, Myanmar”; F.G. Daura-Jorge, et al., “The Structure of a Bottlenose Dolphin Society Is Coupled to a Unique Foraging Cooperation with Artisanal Fishermen.”
- 56.
Elsewhere, Socrates indicates that he is well aware of this (Republic 353a).
- 57.
See, for example, David Sedley , Plato’s Cratylus, 18 & n40.
- 58.
Cratylus states that his agreement with Heracleitus is well considered, but does not clearly indicate when he adopted that view (440d8–e2). It seems to me unlikely that Socrates would have accidentally introduced the doctrine of Heracleitus into the discussion without knowing that it would enable him to show that Cratylus held inconsistent beliefs.
- 59.
There are stories, which Plato may have assumed his readers would know, according to which Cratylus eventually stopped using words entirely, thus relinquishing his claim to know a naturally correct vocabulary in favor of his Heracleitianism. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1010a7–15. Aristotle also reports that Plato himself became acquainted with the doctrine of Heracleitus through Cratylus, and that Plato continued to believe that the objects of sense perception are in perpetual flux (ibid., 987a32–b7). Plato, of course, did not stop using words.
- 60.
Leo Strauss deprecates Rousseau’s own philosophizing and suggests that it marks a significant departure from Socrates and Plato: “One must contrast the dreamlike character of Rousseau’s solitary contemplation with the wakefulness of philosophic contemplation” (Natural Right and History, 293). In light of this passage from the Cratylus, one might wonder whether the modes of contemplation in which Socrates, Plato, and Rousseau sought to engage were necessarily as different as Strauss seems to imply. In a discussion of the difference between erudition and knowledge, moreover, Rousseau implicitly likens his manner of teaching to that of Socrates: “I give my dreams as dreams, leaving the reader to discover whether they contain something useful to people who are awake” (Emile, O.C., 4:351n, Bloom, 112n).
- 61.
If or to the extent that a philosopher wants to help his readers escape the grip of these assumptions, he will likely need to revise the vocabulary he has been given by his society. This is something that Rousseau frequently does, most conspicuously in the Social Contract but in other places as well. See, for example, Emile, O.C., 4:299, 426, Bloom, 77, 165. In a draft preface to the Confessions , he said, “For what I have to say, it would be necessary to invent a language as new as my project” (O.C., 1:1153). Even in his private correspondence, Rousseau insisted that his readers must learn his “dictionary” because he does not always use terms in their ordinary sense (Rousseau to Mme. d’Epinay, March 1756, Corr. Comp., no. 391, 3:296). He often complicates matters, however, by shifting back and forth between different usages, sometimes even within the same book, as he acknowledges (Emile, O.C., 4:345n, Bloom, 108n).
- 62.
In the Essay, Rousseau does not discuss what the Discourse calls the pure state of nature. Perhaps this is only because it is obvious that truly isolated individuals would not have the slightest need to develop anything like our languages. It is also possible, however, that this is an indication that his account of human evolution is not crucially dependent on the claim that humans actually lived in near-total isolation at one time. Thus, if our earliest ancestors in fact lived more like polygynous gorillas or monogamous gibbons than like orangutans , little or nothing would have to change in Rousseau’s account of human nature and the development of human societies. See also S.C., bk. 1, chap. 2, O.C., 3:352, where Rousseau characterizes the family as the only natural society, while noting that once a child no longer depends on its father for its preservation the family maintains itself by convention rather than by nature.
- 63.
See also Essay, chap. 1, O.C., 5:379 (“[P]rovided only that there is some means of communication between himself and his fellows by which the one can act and the other feel, they will eventually manage to communicate to one another as many ideas as they have.”).
- 64.
Rousseau frequently seems to assume that various languages originated independently, but nothing crucial in his account depends on such an assumption. Northern languages almost certainly developed later than southern languages, given that the human race originated in a warm climate and that most of the world is relatively warm (ibid., chap. 8, O.C., 5:394). But whether the northern languages arose independently or through a modification of a language that people brought with them from the south, Rousseau’s explanation of the differences between them could still be valid.
- 65.
In his Dictionary of Music , Rousseau says that the laws, the histories, and the praises of gods and heros were all sung among the ancients before they were written, adding on the authority of Aristotle that this explains why the Greeks used the same word for laws and songs (O.C., 5:690). The apparent source for Rousseau’s reference to Aristotle is Problems 19.28, 919b38–920a2, which says that before people knew how to write, they sang their laws in order not to forget them, and later continued to call their laws songs. Characteristically, Rousseau suggests a different explanation than Aristotle’s, after having thought for himself about what Aristotle says.
- 66.
Charles Darwin believed that the half-human progenitors of our race instinctively used music in courtship before they had articulate language, and he saw evidence of this in popular music. “Love is still the commonest theme of our own songs … The sensations and ideas excited in us by music, or by the cadences of impassioned oratory, appear from their vagueness, yet depth, like mental reversions to the emotions and thoughts of a long-past age” (Descent of Man, 2:320–21).
- 67.
“[Melody] is what the Greek language had, and what ours lacks” (Essay, chap. 12, O.C., 5:411).
- 68.
Rousseau’s allusion to Euripides may reflect a report that Plato wrote tragedies early in his life. See Diogenes Laertius , Lives of Eminent Philosophers 3.6. The attacks on Homer in the dialogues are well known, but Rousseau was also well aware of the educational use to which music is put in both the Republic and the Laws. The critique of Homer that Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates is in many ways ironic, and is more subtle than it may first appear to be. See, for example, Timothy W. Burns , “Philosophy and Poetry: A New Look at an Old Quarrel.” The same could be said of Rousseau’s critique here of Plato.
- 69.
In the Emile, Rousseau tentatively extends his analysis in the following way:
Minds (têtes) are formed by languages, thoughts take on the color of the idioms, reason alone is common, the mind (l’esprit) in each language has its particular form; a difference that could well be partly the cause or the effect of national characters, and what appears to confirm this conjecture is that in all the nations of the world the language follows the vicissitudes of mœurs and is conserved or altered as they are. (O.C., 4:346, Bloom, 109)
- 70.
Adam Smith , who was familiar with the Discourse on Inequality but not with the Essay on the Origin of Languages, offers an account of the development of languages that agrees with Rousseau’s in many respects. See “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.” Smith’s speculations about the evolution of languages, however, focus almost entirely on what Rousseau regards as the intellectual aspect of speech. Unlike Rousseau, he gives virtually no attention to the role of moral passions. It is therefore striking that Smith contends that ancient languages, especially Greek, were superior in “variety” and “sweetness,” and that our tongues are “more and more imperfect, and less proper for many of the purposes of language” (ibid., 224). Rousseau’s attention to the relative musicality of different languages, and his richer account of the multiple purposes of language, enables him to offer an account of the beauty and power of ancient Greek that Smith recognized but could not fully explain.
- 71.
Mithen , Singing Neanderthals, chap. 6.
- 72.
Rousseau was well aware of this phenomenon. See Emile, O.C., 4:285, Bloom, 65.
- 73.
One piece of evidence is especially telling. Chinese is a tonal language, so the use of exaggerated prosody toward children risks linguistic confusion. Chinese mothers do it anyway, intuitively evading and sometimes violating the conventions of their native tongue (Mithen , Singing Neanderthals, 73–74). A separate study showed that when speaking to pet cats and dogs, to whom we want to convey our feelings and intentions, people employ a prosody that resembles infant-directed speech, with one important exception. People do not use hyperarticulation of vowels when talking to their pets, which suggests that this one aspect of infant-directed speech is used primarily to assist in the acquisition of language (ibid., 74–75).
- 74.
Ibid., chap. 8.
- 75.
See, for example, Anna Ilona Roberts, et al., “Chimpanzees Modify Intentional Gestures to Coordinate a Search for Hidden Food”; Catherine Hobaiter and Richard W. Byrne, “The Meanings of Chimpanzee Gestures.”
- 76.
See Mithen , Singing Neanderthals, chaps. 9–10.
- 77.
Ibid., chaps. 9, 15–16.
- 78.
Current usage among scientists classifies humans and great apes as hominids, and reserves the term hominins for modern humans and other descendants of the last common ancestor that we share with the chimpanzees . The extent of our ignorance about our closest extinct relatives is suggested by the recent discovery of a freshwater shell marked with geometrical engravings. These engravings are some 300,000 years older than any that had previously been found, and they were apparently produced by a hominin who lived hundreds of thousands of years before our own species emerged in Africa. See Josephine C. A. Joordens, et al., “Homo erectus at Trinil on Java Used Shells for Tool Production and Engraving.”
- 79.
In addition to the fossil evidence, preliminary genetic analysis also suggests that Neanderthals lived in small, isolated groups (Sergei Castellano, et al., “Patterns of Coding Variation in the Complete Exomes of Three Neanderthals”).
- 80.
The evidence is based on genetic analysis, and it is possible that other hominins contributed to our gene pool as well. See Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes; Henry Gee, The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, 91–92; Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse, The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story, 170–71.
- 81.
For an argument that the extinction of the Neanderthals and the success of modern humans was almost entirely a matter of luck, in a kind of lottery created by significant and disruptive climate change, see Finlayson, Humans Who Went Extinct. For a competing explanation, which treats our ancestors as an invasive species that outcompeted Neanderthals and several other large predators, see Pat Shipman, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. The evidence currently available seems to allow for a variety of scenarios in which chance and some peculiar characteristics of modern humans (both physical and cultural) played greater or lesser roles in the extinction of the Neanderthals.
- 82.
Some minimal cultural change appears to have occurred after, and possibly because of, the arrival in Europe of modern humans.
- 83.
This suggestion has not gone unchallenged. Some scientists argue that the most important changes occurred between about 60,000 and 80,000 years ago. Others place the date much earlier, between 100,000 and 250,000 years ago. If the earlier estimates are correct, the expansion of our ancestral population out of Africa about 50,000 years ago might not have been caused primarily by a significant change in behavior that arose at that time. For a short introduction to the debate, see Stringer, Lone Survivors, 125–28.
- 84.
See Quentin D. Atkinson, “Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa.”
- 85.
For all we know, other hominins may have developed such languages and yet gone extinct, perhaps because of environmental changes in the areas where they happened to live.
- 86.
See, for example, Mithen , Singing Neanderthals, chap. 14.
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Lund, N. (2016). The Evolution of Humanity in Language: Discourse on Inequality and Essay on the Origin of Languages . In: Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41390-7_3
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Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41389-1
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eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)