Hallo!

On Wed, 14 Apr 2010 01:14:13 +0200, Lars Finsen wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> 
> > quoting Benct Philip Jonsson:
> >
> >> The mother of invention is necessity.  As long as
> >> Paleolithic humans were well adapted to their environ-
> >> ment and could, in their own view, live in reasonable
> >> wellbeing they had no incentive to invent anything.
> >
> > Yes.  People tend to stay with their habits, and most are slow
> > in accepting new technologies.
> 
> Not only that, but "habit" tends to be viewed as the right way to do  
> things, as long as they provide the necessary results. Sometimes you  
> need pretty strong forces to break it.

Yes.

> Still, external forces aren't the only origins of invention. Humans  
> have a natural tendency to experiment and try out new things, some  
> more than others.

Certainly, human inventiveness goes beyond things people are actually
in need of.  Also, the notion that hunter-gatherers lived in eternal
happiness is nothing than a modern version of the "noble savage"
fallacy.  Some people like to think that the road to civilization was
a road to ruin, with all that pollution, deadly weaponry and all that
that endanger our existence today.  It is nonsense.  Life in primitive
hunter-gatherer societies means life in hardship.  Hunting is hard and
dangerous work, even if it may be more "natural" to us than tilling a
field or staring at a computer screen.  Even hunter-gatherers have an
incentive to improve their equipment and their methods in order to
make work easier and more efficient.  And then, fashions and artistic
styles change rapidly *without* any material need to change them.
It is just that people want to experience new things, at least
occasionally.

The things left behind by _Homo erectus_, Neanderthals and their ilk
show an extremely slow change in toolkit and techniques, and an
absence of objects made just for their artistic value.  What we find
are hand-axes, spears and other useful things; while they are often
indeed quite beautiful, their forms are entirely dictated by their
functions.  We find no clear examples of art, and no musical
instruments (while flutes have been found at Upper Paleolithic _Homo
sapiens_ sites from as early as 35,000 years ago).

>       Language itself is a reflection of this, because in  
> principle there is no limit to what you can name. Or is our inventive  
> ability a reflection of our linguistic ability?

There is certainly a connection of some kind.  With our languages,
we can talk about things that do not really exist.  Our popular
culture is full of such things as dragons and starships.  It is hard
to say what is the reflection of what; language is not only a means
of communication, but also a tool for conceptualization.  I am not
a Whorfian, however, and I think that language *reflects* rather than
determines which way people think.  I find it difficult to imagine,
however, that beings as hidebound as Lower and Middle Paleolithic
stone tools seem to indicate they are, already had fully developed
languages of the kind we have now.  They certainly had *some* kind
of "language" going far beyond what chimpanzees can manage, but
*something* probably was still missing though I can't say what.

> > [...] People started
> > farming because foraging was no longer sufficient to maintain the
> > population.
> 
> I doubt it. When foraging is not sufficient any more where you're at,  
> you look for a better place. That's the advantage of the foraging  
> culture. You look for a better place, or for other people who have  
> what you need, to obtain it one way or another.

What is when all good foraging ground one can reach are already taken
by people who won't share, perhaps for the same reasons?  You will
perhaps try to get more out of the land you live in than what you
could get so far.  It is also likely that farming did not start by
someone saying "Let's put some seed into the ground so we can reap
the plants later", but rather by accident: people carried wild grains
into their camps where they'd thresh them, losing seeds on the way,
and thereby changing the environment of their settlement into a patch
of land where good cereal plants were more abundant than in the wild,
etc.

> I have long believed that agriculture arose because people  
> accidentally discovered that wild grain could ferment. Bread is just  
> a by-product. Valuable, but never enough to give up your freedom for.  
> Recently I have read some archaeological stuff supporting this idea.

I have heard of that hypothesis, yes, but remain unconvinced.

> [...]
> > As I said before, there is no sharp boundary between "language" and
> > "non-language".  It is clear that all non-impaired individuals of
> > _Homo sapiens_ have language; it is also clear that our closest
> > living relatives (genus _Pan_) have not; what _Homo_ species other
> > than _Homo sapiens_ used to communicate among themselves is unknown,
> > but it probably had at least some features of modern human languages,
> > the later the more.  It was a slow and gradual process which lasted
> > at least 2 million years.
> 
> It all depends what you mean by "language". Most species have some  
> way or other to communicate.

Sure.

>       I think the crucial difference is the   
> absence of an instinctive bond between the concept and the symbol,  
> giving us our freedom to expand our concepts without limit. The  
> communicative symbols used by other animals are very largely  
> programmed genetically, and of course we have some of those  
> ourselves, too. But there are birds and whales able to learn new  
> songs, and I wonder what chimpanzees do when they find some entirely  
> new kind of food for which they don't know a call they can use to  
> inform their comrades.

The arbitariness of the sound-meaning relation is indeed a key feature
of human language, cultural transmission (as opposed to genetic
programming) another.  Another key feature is "duality of patterning":
the smallest building blocks of language utterances, the phonemes,
are meaningless in themselves; the smallest *meaningful* units, the
morphemes, usually consist of more than one phoneme.  This is the
prerequisite for the set of morphemes being open (i.e., while it is
finite, it is large, and new morphemes can be added to it at any time).
Only with this "trick", combined with a complex and recursive grammar,
it is possible to speak about *everything*, even imaginary things.
No non-human animal can do this.  Perhaps non-sapiens Homo languages
had closed vocabularies - no new morphemes could be added to the
lexicon.  Perhaps they had flat grammatical structures not allowing
subclauses and all that.  We don't know.

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