Study: New clues to ancient thinkers

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Study: New clues to ancient thinkers


Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re:
More detail. Here's the article from Nature Science Update Highlights:
14 January 2002. A recent Scientific American article (written without
knowledge of this research) had suggested that language was about 35 or
40K years old -- and speculated that it had been invented (several
times) by children.

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CB: We might also speculate that the children invented language in part while 
they were asleep and dreaming.

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Every article I read has a different estimate of how
old "biologically modern humans" are, ranging from 90K to 150K plus or
minus. The URL below gives you some fine photographs of the stones.

Carrol

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CB: I think the species homo sapiens originates with invention of the 
complementary institutions of preservation of experience for future 
generations/ancestor "worship" or remembering the experiences of ancestors. The 
significance of language and all symbolling, like the drawings in the article,  
is that they allow transgenerational  ( transmortal generations ) 
communication, thereby expanding the social field of the living generation 
enormously. It allows the living generation to learn from the lived experience, 
practice of the dead generations. Of course, language and symboling expands 
greatly the social connections of within the living generation too. So, 
language and symbolling has a double effect in expanding the social field of 
the ancient group of hominids that were pre-human.  Language and symbolling are 
 artifactual indicators that the species has been initiated. Another way of 
saying it is that the human species originates with communism, wherein 
communism is the net!
work of social connections among the living and across the generations. Humans 
originate on the principle that two heads are better than one.

Pace Engels. The main significance of social labor in the emergence of humans 
from apes is that it is _social_ labor. Not only are two hands better than one, 
but the tools develop based on multigenerational experience that cannot 
accumulate without transgenerational communication. The key thing  about the 
invention of the wheel, for example, is that people didn't have to keep 
reinventing it every generation.

With respect to discussions of evolutionary biological development,  
transgenerational communication and culture basically create for the human 
species a form or mechanism of "inheritance of acquired characteristics" or a 
socalled Lamarckian mechanism, even as the "characteristics" are both  
behavioral and _artificial_ bodily ( such as clothes in their extra layer of 
skin capacity) .   This is the obvious answer to a riddle that Carling poses in 
the article "The Proof of the Pudding: Reason and Value in Social Evolution" 
that Jim Farmelant referenced a while ago. ( 
http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/marxism/carling.htm ).   I think that most 
evolutionary biologists would agree that any species that somehow develops a 
mechnanism for inheritance of acquired characteristics is at a generalized 
adaptational advantage, as humans have been. The "inheritance of acquired 
characterisitcs" dimension of culture helps solve the following puzzle posed by 
Carling:

"Given the adaptationist premise of the argument, there must be reproductive 
and/or survival advantages conferred by the realised capacity for symbolic 
communication. But these advantages are conferred precisely by the 
content-freedom which symbolic communication entails. It is this freedom from 
genetic determinism that is responsible for the genetic advantage enjoyed by 
individuals with enhanced linguistic capacities. This in a nutshell is the form 
of the special argument that seems required to account for the 
characteristically non-modular mental capacities of the human species."

It is the freedom from genetic determinism AND EQUALLY AS IMPORTANTLY, the 
retention by culture of the genes' ability  to BEQUETH and INHERIT 
adaptationally significant characteristics.



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