{"id":64427,"date":"2024-06-07T07:16:54","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T12:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=64427"},"modified":"2024-06-09T08:43:37","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T13:43:37","slug":"the-evolution-of-metaphors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=64427","title":{"rendered":"The evolution of metaphors?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today's Frazz<\/a> has a nice metaphor about life cycles:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Which called to mind an odd (to me) new theory about the language of Neanderthals, presented in a 5\/20\/2024 review essay by Stephen Mithen<\/a>, \"How Neanderthal language differed from modern human \u2013 they probably didn\u2019t use metaphors<\/a>\":<\/p>\n

[T]he evidence points to key differences in the brains of our species and those of Neanderthals that allowed modern humans (H. sapiens<\/em>) to come up with abstract and complex ideas through metaphor \u2013 the ability to compare two unrelated things. For this to happen, our species had to diverge from the Neanderthals in our brain architecture.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some experts interpret the skeletal and archaeological evidence as indicating profound differences. Others believe there were none. And some take the middle ground<\/u><\/a>. […]<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While it may be possible to join the puzzle pieces in several different ways, my long wrestle with the multi-disciplinary evidence has found only one solution. This begins with iconic words being spoken by the ancient human species\u00a0Homo erectus<\/em>\u00a0around 1.6 million years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

As these types of words were transmitted from generation to generation, arbitrary words and rules of syntax emerged, providing the early Neanderthals and\u00a0H. sapiens<\/em>\u00a0with equivalent linguistic and cognitive capacities.<\/span><\/p>\n

But these diverged as both species continued to evolve. The\u00a0H. sapiens<\/em>\u00a0brain developed its spherical form with neural networks connecting what had been isolated semantic clusters of words. These remained isolated in the Neanderthal brain. So, while\u00a0H. sapiens<\/em>\u00a0and Neanderthals had equivalent capacity for iconic words and syntax, they appear to have differed with respect to storing ideas in semantic clusters in the brain.<\/span><\/p>\n

By linking up different clusters in the brain that are responsible for storing groups of concepts, our species gained the capacity to think and communicate using metaphor. This allowed modern humans to draw a line between widely different concepts and ideas.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was arguably the most important of our cognitive tools,\u00a0enabling us to come up with complex and abstract concepts<\/a>. While iconic words and syntax were shared between\u00a0H. sapiens<\/em>\u00a0and Neanderthals, metaphor transformed the language, thought and culture of our species, creating a deep divide with the Neanderthals. They went extinct, while we populated the world and continue to flourish.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is far from my areas of specialization, but I've never been convinced that \"Neanderthals\" (and Denisovans) are actually a separate species from H. sapiens<\/em>. See this paper<\/a> for a recent consideration of the issues, which ends up supporting the traditional taxonomic ideas despite presenting lots of contrary evidence — and this article<\/a> for a more contrary view…<\/p>\n

And I'm even more skeptical of the idea that the (relatively modest) differences in (the distribution of measururements of) skull endocasts point to the development of metaphors as a determinative difference, especially given the large (and underdocumented) variation in endocast measures in H. sapiens<\/em> across space and time. Other kinds of skull measurements were a big deal for 19th-century racist anthropologists<\/a>, and as a result, the topic has largely been shunned by modern researchers. [What little modern work has been done, e.g. the \"Open Research Scan Archive\" (ORSA) at the Penn Museum<\/a>, does not seem to be available<\/a> to researchers…]<\/p>\n

In any case, here's Mithin's illustration of hominin language evolution:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a step forward over the position of Lieberman & Crelin, \"On the speech of Neanderthal Man<\/a>\", Linguistic Inquiry<\/em> 1971 — which concluded, also on the basis of skull measurements and endocast properties, that<\/p>\n

We have previously determined by means of acoustic analysis that Newborn humans, like nonhuman primates, lack <\/span>the anatomical mechanism that is necessary to produce articulate speech. That is, they cannot produce the range of sounds that characterizes human speech. We can now demonstrate that the skeletal features <\/span>of Neanderthal man show that his supralaryngeal vocal apparatus was similar to that of a Newborn human. […]<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Neanderthal man did not have the anatomical prerequisites for producing the full range of human speech. He probably lacked some of the neural detectors that are involved in the perception of human speech. He was not as well equipped for language as modern man. His phonetic ability was, however, more advanced than those of present day nonhuman primates and his brain may have been sufficiently well de<\/span>veloped for him to have established a language based on the speech signals at his command. The general level of Neanderthal culture is such that this limited phonetic ability was probably utilized and that some form of language existed.<\/span><\/p>\n

And its a bigger advance over the original view of Neanderthals as subhuman scavengers<\/a>. One step at a time…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today's Frazz has a nice metaphor about life cycles: Which called to mind an odd (to me) new theory about the language of Neanderthals, presented in a 5\/20\/2024 review essay by Stephen Mithen, \"How Neanderthal language differed from modern human \u2013 they probably didn\u2019t use metaphors\": [T]he evidence points to key differences in the brains […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-of-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64427"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64481,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64427\/revisions\/64481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}