Description
Book SynopsisThis book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is conceptualized as a collective invention, on the model of writing or the wheel, and the book places social and cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution: language emerged and further developed in human communities already suffused with meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance, alloparenting, new divisions of labour and revolutionary changes in social relations. The book thus challenges assumptions about the causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication and innovation: the biological capacities are taken to evolve incrementally on the basis of cognitive plasticity, in a process that recruits previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve novel communicative ends. Topics include the ability brought about by language to tell lies, that must have confronted our ancestors with new problems of public trust; the dynamics of social-cognitive co-evolution; the role
Table of ContentsPART 1 THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS; PART 2 LANGUAGE AS A COLLECTIVE OBJECT; PART 3 APES AND PEOPLE, PAST AND PRESENT; PART 4 THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE; PART 5 THE JOURNEY THEREAFTER
