The gesture-call practices of early hominids were of a different order from those of their primate relatives, the ancestors of present day apes. The Tool-Cue Model postulates how our ancestors might have used tools both as functional instruments and as icons. The central thesis of the model treats communication as action systems mediated by signs, the central communicative action being the action cue: a communicative act that requires further behaviours to be satisfied. Tools are interpreted as framing devices, promoting the emergence of pragmatic/semantic duality. This latter feature is based on grammatical structures that include pragmatic and semantic meanings in the same utterance. Human language, i.e. symbolic pragmatics, appropriated the action cue meaning of tools and, simultaneously, transformed tools into symbolic ‘warrants’ by which modern humans transform both their speech and material behaviours into the types of social activities we intend. Post-Oldowan Lower and Middle Pleistocene lithics serve as empirical evidence in support of the Tool-Cue Model.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.