[MD] Unkludging the MoQ

[Krimel]

> [Krimel]
> The two avenues of excavation that seem most promising to me are
> phylogeneticially, by looking at the social and communicative practice of
> our closest primate relatives.
> And ontogenetically, in terms of the development of communicative
practices
> in infants and young children.
[Dave]
That's what Alda's brain special was all about. That work while very
interesting and informative establishing the differences between animal
brains and human brains does little to establish timeframe.

[Krimel]
What was the name of that program? There is a very good one available online
at pbs.org
It was on Nova and is called Ape Genius. Michael Tomasello is on it.

> [Krimel]
>In either case I think it is a safe
> conclusion that humans, as humans, have never been without language.
> 
[Dave]
In general I agree that once humans were physiologically modern (125,000
years ago more or less) they more than likely had language. But full blown
language with grammar, syntax, etc. requires a brain capable of a high level
of abstraction. Might there be another process that helped the capacity
develop other than language? And one that might narrow the timeframe down?

[Krimel]
Right. It is speculative, of course, but I would say the latest possible
date for language is cave paint at 50,000 years ago or so. But either way or
any way you look at it, whatever we were before we had language, we were
fully human after we got it and not fully human until we did.

There certainly are other processes that contributed to and were expanded by
the increased size and complexity of human brains. Upright posture for
example frees the hands to do other things and they evolved to do things
better. The human brain is essentially an input output system. We tend to
focus on input and output of concepts here on this forum but increased brain
size and complexity also gives us manual dexterity and fine motor control of
the hands. These are a distinctly human traits. In other words man is the
only animal that can its shoes. 

Another result of a larger more complex brain is the number of things you
can think of at once. There is a guy on FORA.TV (available on HULU) who
claims that what makes humans different from apes is just this, the number
of things we can consider at one time. He claims that apes can only think of
three things at once. For example, an ape can use a rock to crack a nut
against an anvil; three things. Humans can handle the magic number 7 plus or
minus two things in their heads at once. That's our edge.

That span is much studied and has various names, short term memory,
executive memory, or just awareness. That jump from three things to seven
things seems to provide an exponential increase in the number of things we
can think to do with our hands besides twiddling our thumbs.