Thinking about Language

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 50, Number 4

By Robin Dunbar.

"Just what makes the difference between apes (and especially chimpanzees) and humans has remained one of the perennial questions that has bedeviled much of the debate in comparative psychology, as well as primatology and anthropology, over most of the past century. Language, of course, is one answer, but in the end what really underpins language is cognition. In Origins of Human Communication (originally presented as the Jean Nicod Lectures in Paris in 2006), Michael Tomasello offers us a glimpse of where he thinks the real answer probably lies. His starting point is that language has its basis in communication, and that communication is, at root, cooperative rather than manipulative. The other key prong of his attack is the claim that human language evolved from an essentially gestural precursor, not from a vocal one."

Read the article. 

Image from Flickr Creative Commons.