Homo sapiens is the clever hominid: primate social intelligence plus language

This chapter is part of a long-term project for the teasing out of implications of a social origin of human intelligence – for of course our species is distinguished as Homo sapiens sapiens – the intelligent hominid. Recent ethological research argues convincingly that primates are on many measures highly intelligent, and that this can best be explained as a product of social interdependence. Higher primate species appear to have a progressively greater capacity to cognitively model responses of others. For convenience this modelling of alternative contingent responses to others' actions can be termed anticipatory interactive planning (AIP). It is also argued in the Introduction that human intelligence was intimately linked to the emergence of language, which fundamentally changed the ways in which primates managed social interdependence.

Spoken language offers ways of influencing others' behaviour. It permits more elaborate negotiation of social interactions, the negotiation of joint AIP strategies. It becomes possible to seek cooperation with one's own goals through the exchange of information (‘there are more nuts over there under the big tree’); and to manipulate relationships themselves through asking, pleading, begging, pretending, threatening, insisting, promising. Spoken language became, as it continues to be, central to our human AIP modelling. As speech presumes an exchange of messages, this makes dialogue, literally ‘speaking alternately’, a fundamental form in hominid sociality. The importance of an exchange of messages for the emergence of a lexicon, i.e. shared meanings, is modelled by Hutchins and Hazlehurst in Chapter 2.