Abstract
The question of language development and origin is a subject that is vital to our understanding of what it means to be human. This is reflected in the large range of academic disciplines that are dedicated to the subject. Language development has in particular been related to studies in cognitive capacity and the ability for mind reading, often termed a theory of mind. The Social Brain Hypothesis has been the only attempt to correlate a cognitive scale of complexity incorporating a theory of mind and intentionality orders to the archaeological record and hominin phylogeny. However, a method is still lacking that allows a correlation of the orders of intentionality (and by inference a theory of mind and language development) to the archaeological signatures that represent the physical expression of hominin behaviour. This paper is primarily concerned with introducing a new theoretical perspective – termed the identity model – which facilitates such a correlation between a scale of cognitive acuity, hominin behaviour through the archaeological record and subsequently language development within an evolutionary context.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was written as a result of Ph.D research undertaken as part of the British Academy Centenary Project ‘From Lucy to language: the archaeology of the social brain’ and I would like to thank all members of the project who have contributed to previous discussions on this topic. I would further like to thank John McNabb, Robin Dunbar, Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, Will Davies and the two anonymous reviewers for all of their patience and insightful comments on various aspects and versions of this paper. Any errors remain my own.
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Cole, J. Hominin Language Development: A New Method of Archaeological Assessment. Biosemiotics 8, 67–90 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9198-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-014-9198-8