Talking About Tools: Did Early Pleistocene Hominins Have a Protolanguage?

Planer, Ronald J.

doi:10.1007/s13752-017-0279-1

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…All these species belonged to the genus Homo. They were all hunter-gatherers, used stone tools, were able to control fire, and at least some of them probably had some rudimentary form of language and culture [31]. Yet at the time of our grand tour, some 200,000 years ago, there was no indication whatsoever that 175,000 years later only one hominin species would remain-us-while all others would go extinct.…”

Section: Hominin Species Competitionmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Encultured Primate: Thresholds and Transitions in Hominin Cultural Evolution

Buskes

2019

Philosophies

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This article tries to shed light on the mystery of human culture. Human beings are the only extant species with cumulative, evolving cultures. Many animal species do have cultural traditions in the form of socially transmitted practices but they typically lack cumulative culture. Why is that? This discrepancy between humans and animals is even more puzzling if one realizes that culture seems highly advantageous. Thanks to their accumulated knowledge and techniques our early ancestors were able to leave their cradle in Africa and swarm out across the planet, thereby adjusting themselves to a whole range of new environments. Without culture this would have been impossible. So we may ask once again: if cumulative culture is so useful, why don’t other animals have it? In order to explain this mystery I won’t appeal to the major transitions in human evolution—like walking upright, crafting stone tools and controlling fire, etc.,—because that would be question begging. Instead I try to unearth the mechanisms that caused those evolutionary turning points to occur in the first place. It seems that unlike other animals, humans are predisposed to efficiently acquire, store and transmit cultural information in such ways that our cultures can genuinely evolve.

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Section: Hominin Species Competitionmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Encultured Primate: Thresholds and Transitions in Hominin Cultural Evolution

Buskes

2019

Philosophies

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“…Gradualists often hunt for precursor systems to language—sometimes called “protolanguages”—communication traditions that have some, but not all, of the distinctive features of modern and ethnographically known languages. Here we focus on Ronald Planer's (, ) account, which links language to Acheulean lithics.…”

Section: Lithics Mind and Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Planer argues that Early Pleistocene hominins had protolanguage on the basis of Acheulean material remains, particularly tools. First, he outlines a “package of cognitive abilities” that are “sufficient, given appropriate socio‐ecological conditions, for the emergence and continued existence of language” (Planer, , p. 212). Second, he provides archaeological evidence suggestive of the presence of these abilities in ancient hominins.…”

Section: Lithics Mind and Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

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From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology

Currie

Killin

2019

Mind & Language

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Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace‐based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, we also argue that the success of cognitive archaeology does not necessarily require well‐developed cognitive theories: Success might instead lead to them.

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“…For arguments that pragmatic inference is possible with a substantially less rich cognitive package than these scholars maintain, see Planer (2017aPlaner ( , 2017b). e va n s e t a l .…”

Section: Multiple Perspective In G R Ammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

The grammar of engagement I: framework and initial exemplification

2017

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a b st r a c t Human language offers rich ways to track, compare, and engage the attentional and epistemic states of interlocutors. While this task is central to everyday communication, our knowledge of the cross-linguistic grammatical means that target such intersubjective coordination has remained basic. In two serialised papers, we introduce the term 'engagement' to refer to grammaticalised means for encoding the relative mental directedness of speaker and addressee towards an entity or state of affairs, and describe examples of engagement systems from around the world. Engagement systems express the speaker's assumptions about the degree to which their attention or knowledge is shared (or not shared) by the addressee. Engagement categories can operate at the level of entities in the here-and-now (deixis), in the unfolding discourse (definiteness vs indefiniteness), entire event-depicting propositions (through markers with clausal scope), and even metapropositions (potentially scoping over evidential values). In this first paper, we introduce engagement and situate it with respect to existing work on intersubjectivity in language. We then explore the key role of deixis in coordinating attention and expressing t h e g r a m m a r o f e n g a g e m e n t i 111 engagement, moving through increasingly intercognitive deictic systems from those that focus on the the location of the speaker, to those that encode the attentional state of the addressee.k e y w o r d s : engagement, attention, intersubjectivity, deixis, coordination.These two individuals, the producer and the recipient of language, or as we may more conveniently call them, the speaker and the hearer, and their relations to one another, should never be lost sight of if we want to understand the nature of language and of that part of language which is dealt with in grammar.

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Talking About Tools: Did Early Pleistocene Hominins Have a Protolanguage?

Cited by 24 publications

References 23 publications

The Encultured Primate: Thresholds and Transitions in Hominin Cultural Evolution

The Encultured Primate: Thresholds and Transitions in Hominin Cultural Evolution

From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology

The grammar of engagement I: framework and initial exemplification

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