Abstract
This article addresses the question of whether early Pleistocene hominins are plausibly viewed as having possessed a protolanguage, that is, a communication system exemplifying some but not all of the distinctive features of fully modern human language. I argue that the answer is “yes,” mounting evidence from the early Pleistocene “lithics niche.” More specifically, I first describe a cognitive platform that I think would have been sufficient, given appropriate socio-ecological conditions, for the creation and retention of a protolanguage. Then, using archaeological evidence pertaining to hominin lithic behavior from the early Pleistocene, I attempt to make plausible the idea that each of these cognitive abilities were in fact in place by this point in hominin evolutionary history and also that the requisite socio-ecological conditions were satisfied.
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Notes
This lumps together significant hominin diversity; most noticeably, it collapses Homo habilis and Homo erectus into a single category. However, a considerable amount of the evidence discussed in this article pertains not just to erectine behavior but to habiline behavior as well (or at least to the behavior of the very earliest erectines).
The term “protolanguage” is sometimes used to refer to the “mother language” of all extant languages. As will become clear below, this is not how I intend the term here. Rather, I simply mean a communication system that exemplifies some, but not all, of the distinctive features of fully modern human language.
See Apperly (2010) for an excellent overview of the many ways in which theory of mind can be limited.
See Planer (2017) for a discussion of this issue.
One might object that I am stacking the deck against a heuristics-based approach to problem-solving (construed broadly) by positing the above heuristic rather than some alternative one. It would of course be possible to develop some other heuristic that would fare better in this example, but it would be just as easy to then present an alternative example in which it breaks down.
More generally, attempts to avoid mental models (because, e.g., they are too representationally “rich”) in favor of heuristics rapidly leads to the proliferation of such heuristics, a result which many in cognitive science see as seriously problematic.
Many authors wish to reserve the term “imitation” for cases where an individual not only copies the behavior of some actor but also represents the goal of that actor. I use the term here in a more permissive way so that representation of the actor’s goal or intention may be involved but need not be. (For a discussion of these two different ways of thinking about imitation and a defense of the latter see Leighton et al. 2010).
I will use “her” (etc.) to refer to the actor and “him” (etc.) to refer to the reactor in what follows.
In time, dispositions to produce and interpret signals in accordance with certain patterns or regularities might become “genetically specified.”
This idea is consistent with recent modeling work on the emergence of combinatorial and compositional signals. See, for example, Franke (2016).
I thank Kim Sterelny for this point.
See Butterfill and Apperly (2013) for a discussion.
As Kim Sterelny points out to me, an additional argument for improved meta-psychological abilities relative to those of chimpanzees can also be mounted on the basis of evidence suggesting ambush hunting of large game over 1 mya (Kübler et al. 2015). As this does not directly concern early Pleistocene lithic behavior, however, I leave it aside here.
Sometimes up to distances of 100 km (Petraglia et al. 2005).
One might worry that these hominins could have been adept at constructing mental models of physical situations while being unable to construct models of intentional systems. While such a scenario cannot be ruled out, I think recent neuroimaging work makes it unlikely. That work shows that constructing models of intentional systems (qua intentional systems) recruits many of the same neural networks and circuits that are recruited when we construct models of non-intentional systems. (See Apperly 2010 for an excellent overview and discussion.)
As Peter Hiscock has pointed out to me, while this might be the more likely scenario, substitution is not strictly required to avoid fatigue as the collaborators might have simply worked slowly. I agree this is possible; but even a slow pace would not have rendered them immune to serious injury (though it may have decreased its incidence).
Ideally, this issue about whether the activity in question involved substitution can be decided empirically: were we to find flakes reflecting different skill levels and/or individual “style” within a single reduction sequence, that would be strong evidence indeed for substitution. To the best of my knowledge, such a comparison was not carried out by Petraglia et al., however.
See Sterelny (2012) for a detailed development and discussion of such learning systems.
Sterelny (2012) urges us to adopt this orientation to human evolution in general.
Wrangham seeks to explain the transition from Homo habilis to Homo erectus this way: erectines show shortened guts, larger brains, and dental reduction, all of which point (says Wrangham) to a diet containing cooked meat. Moreover, he uses changes in erectine morphology to argue that these hominins had made the transition from sleeping in trees to sleeping on the ground. He thinks such a transition would have been most unlikely in the absence of controlled fire to keep predators at bay overnight.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Peter Hiscock and Kim Sterelny for their thoughtful comments on this manuscript.
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Planer, R.J. Talking About Tools: Did Early Pleistocene Hominins Have a Protolanguage?. Biol Theory 12, 211–221 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0279-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0279-1