There was no “great leap forward” (contra Diamond, 1991). The twists and turns, booms and busts, carefully uncovered over the past decade in (geography/climate-aware) archaeology ( Scerri et al., 2014, 2018, 2019 Groucutt et al., 2021 Kaboth-Bahr et al., 2021 Foerster et al., 2022 Gosling et al., 2022), alongside the numerous instances of gene flow across species that can be inferred from ancient genomes ( Bergström et al., 2021), leave little room for doubt. I have argued elsewhere ( Boeckx, 2017b, 2021 Martins and Boeckx, 2019 de Boer et al., 2020) that an entire class of evolutionary narratives exemplified by Berwick and Chomsky (2016), which posit one or a few key changes at the level of the genome and the brain that are claimed to have sparked a recent cognitive revolution in our lineage, have lost their initial conceptual appeal because the evolutionary trajectory of our lineage is clearly vastly much more complex than we used to think even just two decades ago. We can ask the same question about the evolution of language and its contribution to the human condition: knowing what we know now about human evolution, and in particular having access to high-quality genomes of our closest extant and extinct relatives ( Meyer et al., 2012 Prüfer et al., 2014, 2017 Mafessoni et al., 2020), are there positions along the spectrum of possible hypotheses regarding the evolution of language and cognition that we can now safely put aside as wrong or so implausible as not to be worthy of serious consideration? It seems clear that many (bad) ideas would have been discarded from the get-go if such evidence had been available back when these ideas began to be formulated. In an interesting thought experiment, Rutherford asks what would have happened to some arguments if, back in the eighteenth century we had known about the range of genetic facts now in our possession. Just like these other traits just mentioned, language may not be this entirely unique and antecedent-free capacity, as it is sometimes claimed to be ( Anderson, 2004 Berwick and Chomsky, 2016), but it is certainly a very salient trait of our species.Īccordingly, I will be focusing on language in this Perspective, examining its nature with a view to shedding light on the “human condition.” I will do so from an evolutionary and interdisciplinary angle, inspired by the sort of question raised by Rutherford (2020) in another context (and with another focus). Language looks to us pretty much like what the trunk is to the elephant, the neck to the giraffe, and echolocation to bats. It makes sense to focus on it in trying to define who we are. It is the most common currency for our daily social transactions. There is also a sizeable literature implicating “language” in the answer to the question of “what makes us human?” Again, this is not too surprising: language use lies at the center of much of what we do as a species. As a species we have a remarkable ability to reflect on objects and events, and it is only natural to apply this ability to ourselves. There is no shortage of books or papers addressing the question of “what makes us human?” This should not come as a surprise. Framing: Beyond “modern” and “archaic/ancestral” In particular, I hypothesize that these different trajectories influence the development of symbolic systems, the flexible ways in which symbols combine, and the size and configurations of the communities in which these systems are put to use.ġ. This paper makes three interconnected claims: (i) the “human condition” cannot be captured by evolutionary narratives that reduce it to a recent ‘cognitive modernity', nor by narratives that eliminates all cognitive differences between us and out closest extinct relatives, (ii) signals from paleogenomics, especially coming from deserts of introgression but also from signatures of positive selection, point to the importance of mutations that impact neurodevelopment, plausibly leading to temperamental differences, which may impact cultural evolutionary trajectories in specific ways, and (iii) these trajectories are expected to affect the language phenotypes, modifying what is being learned and how it is put to use. 3Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain.2Institute of Complex Systems, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.1Section of General Linguistics, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
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