Stone Tools as Indicators of Linguistic Abilities in Early Man
スポンサーリンク
概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
A preceding article in this journal (Frisch, 1965) dealt with a novel way to define the genus Homo in the face of difficulties raised by increasingly numerous discoveries of fossil hominids in East Africa. These difficulties, as we know, have multiplied since, together with the number of new finds (Walker, 1976). It was suggested in that article that the paleoanthropologists, in order to identify the first appearance of the genus Homo, would do well to look at the fossil hominid record in its entirety. Such a global examination would reveal, it was claimed, the point in hominid evolution where the adaptive radiation pattern characteristic of many animal phyla was replaced, first by an absence of further splitting between closely related hominid phyla and later by the reduction of the several hominid species to a single one. This new pattern was named convergence. The factors responsible for this substitution of a convergent to a divergent pattern of evolution were hypothesized to have been principally the development of technology and the emergence of linguistic communication, the former providing an alternative to adaptation through speciation, the latter preventing the formation of reproductively isolated hominid populations. The object of the present article is to further propose a means by which the second of these two factors, the emergence of human language, may be identified in time by a study of the paleoanthropological record.
- 科学基礎論学会の論文
- 1978-03-31