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Chapter 4 - Hominin Evolution II
- Edited by Riadh Abed, Paul St John-Smith
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- Book:
- Evolutionary Psychiatry
- Published online:
- 08 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 29 September 2022, pp 50-63
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- Chapter
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Summary
Our immediate ancestry remains uncertain at this time, but what is clear is that we are all African. This chapter will start with the current debates on the emergence of Homo sapiens and the changes we see in the subsequent 200,000 years in terms of our behavioural and cultural development. We have already shown that the ‘march of progress’ image – so culturally famous from t-shirts to posters – of a line of ever more upright and ‘civilised’ walking ape-to-man creatures is wrong. There has never been a single line, and we are not the apotheosis of evolution. A second myth is that ‘we evolved’ 200,000–300,000 years ago and since then have been static, with only technology progressing. However, humans have continued to change with time. The third conceit is the focus on ‘our’ move ‘out of Africa’ 50,000–60,000 years ago. This idea is problematic: it culturally assumes a non-African terminus as our destiny and is a very Eurocentric view of the world. It is true that a subpopulation of hunter-gather sapiens, most likely Yoruba peoples from around what is now Tanzania, left that continent at around that time, and from that group the rest of the world’s populations emerge. But this is to downplay the fact that for 80% of our species’ existence we have all been entirely African, and a genetically small subgroup left for the last 20% of that time. History is written by the ‘victors’, and much anthropology has been written by Western academia. In 2020, it was estimated that fewer than 2% of whole sequenced genomes have as yet come from Africa (Maxmen, ), and we lack ancient DNA from Africa greater than 15,000 years old (partially due to climactic reasons). However, the tide has begun to turn, and the next 10 years look very exciting in this regard.
The language bioprogram hypothesis
- Derek Bickerton
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- Journal:
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 7 / Issue 2 / June 1984
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 February 2010, pp. 173-188
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- Article
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It is hypothesized that creole languages are largely invented by children and show fundamental similarities, which derive from a biological program for language. The structures of Hawaiian Pidgin and Hawaiian Creole are contrasted, and evidence is provided to show that the latter derived from the former in a single generation. A realistic model of the processes of Creole formation shows how several specific historical and demographic factors interacted to restrict, in varying degrees, the access of pidgin speakers to the dominant language, and hence the nature of input to the children of those speakers. It is shown that the resulting similarities of Creole languages derive from a single grammar with a restricted list of categories and operations. However, grammars of individual Creoles will differ from this grammar to a varying extent: The degree of difference will correlate very closely with the quantity of dominant-language input, which in turn is controlled by extralinguistic factors. Alternative explanations of the above phenomena are surveyed, in particular, substratum theory and monogenesis: Both are found inadequate to account for the facts. Primary acquisition is examined in light of the general hypothesis, and it is suggested that the bioprogram provides a skeletal model of language which the child can then readily convert into the target language. Cases of systematic error and precocious learning provide indirect support for the hypothesis. Some conjectures are made concerning the evolutionary origins of the bioprogram and what study of Creoles and related topics might reveal about language origins.
Précis of Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition
- Merlin Donald
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- Journal:
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 16 / Issue 4 / December 1993
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 February 2010, pp. 737-748
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- Article
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This book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on an inventive capacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture.