Monthly Archives: September 2025

09/6/25

How The Voice Gets Added to Hand-Talk In Human Evolution, Part A5  (Part 21 of 23)

0207 Yes, Language, Perception and Thought, is the title of chapter fourteen. 

The following is what this examiner sees implicit within Mithen’s text, while the text itself explicitly arranges the same information according to an entirely different narrative.

The following seems like an imposition.  But, it conforms to the tenor of chapter fourteen. 

After the domestication of fire, hand-talk fundamentally changes, along with hominin perceptions and thought.  This change sets the stage for the question that Mithen implicitly addresses, asking, “How does the voice get added to hand talk in human evolution?”

0208 The basis for Mithen’s explicit arrangement, the critical assumption, is found in chapter four.  The author rules out consideration of the gestural origins of language.

0209 The basis for the implicit scenario is found in an independent approach, allowing consideration of the gestural origins of “language”, as defined by two characteristics, displacement and symbolic operations.  Clues that substantiate the implicit scenario run through Mithen’s text, starting with the identification of the two defining characteristics, displacement and grammar. 

One important clue is Mithen’s hypothesis of synaesthesia as the basis for the co-evolution of speech and displacement.  Synaesthesia happens when sensations cross modes.  For example, something visible cross modes to yield something acoustic.  Image gets confounded with sound.  In this manner, fully linguistic hand-talk is adorned with voluntary utterances.

0210 Another important clue is Mithen’s elevation of fire as a situation in which synaesthesia manifests.  Fossils of Homo heidelbergensis appear along with evidence for the domestication of fire.  Mithen presents the dots, but does connect them in a way that reveals how synaesthesia is crucially important.

The metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle is another clue.  When the metaphor is taken literally, when a word is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a picture emerges for how hand-talk gesture-words display displacement and provide the raw material for a symbolic order.

0211  I now attend to a different list of take-home messages for chapters ten and fourteen.  The third lesson in the list reflects Mithen’s hidden hypothesis.

0212 To start, after the domestication of fire, hand-talk becomes fully linguistic.  The foundational requirements are already established in proto-linguistic hand talk.  A key development (and it is substantial) is that fully linguistic hand-talk permits grammatically correct counter-intuitive statements that defy sensible construction.  Social construction is required.

0213 The Neanderthal and human lineages separate around 600kyr (thousands of years ago), long before this process is complete.  Neanderthal retains hand-talk in sensible constructions.

0214 With respect to our own lineage, natural (and cultural) selection operates on the social circle of the community (150).  The community (150) has higher number resonances, following Dunbar’s rule of three.  The mega-band (500) gathers seasonally.  The tribe (1500) gathers occasionally.  The voice is recruited for synchronization (communal singing).

With this type of general selection, sexual selection follows.

0215 Once the voice is under voluntary control, then Mithen’s intuition about the crucial role of synaesthesia in language evolution comes into play, in a way that the author does not explicitly envision.  Night-talk already involves singing and dance.  Hand-talk stories are told before the campfire, like the one where the fellow hit the vulture instead of the jaguar in the tree.  These stories trigger social construction of perspective-level cognitive spaces.  Each cognitive space serves as a way to actualize the community as the team of teams.

0216 One problem with this night-talk is that manual-brachial word-gestures are more difficult to recognize.  So, members of the team of teams act out a solution, by attaching a (purely-symbolic) vocalization to each word-gesture.  Mithen discusses the idea in chapter six, concerning iconic and arbitrary words.  Visual sensations from hand-talk spill into acoustic adornments.  In the process, the voice is added to hand talk, as an adaptation to night-talk.

09/5/25

How The Voice Gets Added to Hand-Talk In Human Evolution, Part A6  (Part 22 of 23)

0217 Chapter thirteen, concerning how spoken words keep changing, considers our current Lebenswelt of speech-alone talk, and then tries to project that backwards, into the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, using various evolutionary theories.  He recounts the proposals of Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva in The Genesis of Grammar (2007).  He gives an example of “level two” grammaticization (on page 311).  It look exactly like the hand-talk story that engages social construction in point 0181.

Unfortunately, these theoreticians propose that their theory applies to the evolution of speech.

No wonder Mithen rules out the gestural origins of language.

0218 Nevertheless, even though the lessons of chapter thirteen are explicit and apply to speech-alone talk, they carry an implicit implication that hand-talk words change when vocal utterances are added as adornments.

0219 For example, Mithen notes that language change in our current Lebenswelt of speech-alone talk entangles three dimensions of semantics: meaning (wider or narrower), presence (weakening or strengthening) and message (amelioration and/or perjoration).

Do those sematic dimensions sound vaguely familiar (see point 0020)?

0220 So, how is an evolutionary anthropologist supposed to view the changes in semantic dimensions in regards to the consequences of synaesthesia, applied to fully linguistic hand-talk, during the flickering illumination of a communal fire?

0221 The implications are mind-boggling.

0222 That is not all.

Here is a another picture that re-configures Mithen’s central hypothesis, that synaesthesia plays a crucial role in the evolution of language, into a revelation concerning a reality that Mithen explicitly rules out.

0223 Speech is added to hand-talk as an adornment.

When does adornment become obvious in hominin evolution?

Weirdly, adornment is undeniable soon after the appearance of Homo sapiens in the archaeological record.

Coincidence?

0224 Chapter fifteen, concerning signs and symbols, mentions Charles Peirce for the first time.

In the above figure, standard (team-oriented) day-time hand-talk evokes sensible construction using natural signs.  Icons and indexes account for displacement.  Symbols account for grammar. This is covered earlier while taking the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle literally.

Under these conditions, a “symbol” is a sign-relation whose sign-object is determined by habit, convention, tradition, law and so forth.  One key feature of symbols is that each symbol (in a symbolic order) must be distinct from any other symbol (in that same order).  In a finite symbolic order, symbolic operations may develop.

The contemporary anthropologist’s definition of “symbol” differs from Charles Peirce’s definition of “symbol” as a natural sign-relation.

0225 Chapter fifteen, concerning symbols and signs, relies on contemporary anthropological theory, where a symbol is ‘something’ that evokes social (as opposed to sensible) construction.  

0226 Here is a picture of the two key terms.

0227 Am I suggesting that day-time hand-talk comports with Peirce’s natural sign definition of “symbol” and that night-time speech-adorned hand-talk comports with the “symbol” of contemporary anthropology?

You bet.

0228 Then what, I further ask, is the social construction that Paleolithic artifacts elicit?

Ah, does it have something to do with the community?

Perhaps, riffing off of Tomasello’s nomenclature, I may label what “symbols” adapt to.

Obligatory communal actualizing.

09/4/25

Looking at Steven Mithen’s Book (2024) “The Language Puzzle” (Part 23 of 23)

0229 So, what is The Language Puzzle about, in an implicit sort of way?

It is about how speech gets added to hand talk after the domestication of fire.

The irony of the work is found in Mithen’s explicit denial of the gestural origins of language, while…

… at the same time, the author provides a solution to a question that he cannot even pose.

0230 Examinations don’t get better than this.

This examination adds value to Mithen’s work in a surprising fashion.

0231 This examination suggests that a tremendous amount of theoretical reformulation needs to be done.  In particular, the following juxtaposition of events is suggestive.

0232 I ask, “Does Homo sapien’s encounter, love affair, then divorce from the Neanderthals create a condition where speech becomes more and more independent as a mode of talking?  Does speech become capable of operating linguistically, independent of hand talk, yet remain integrated into the natural-sign references of hand-talk?”

0233 Take a look at the artifact of the lion-man, pictured in figure 3 on page 28 of Mithen’s text.

Maybe, we can ask him.

Do you think that he has something to say to us?

Surely, he cannot perform hand-talk.

So, the lion-man must speak for itself.

0233 Yes, it’s like synaesthesia gone wild.

0234 But, “wild” is not even close to this last implication, which tells me that our current Lebenswelt is not the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

What about the item in red?

See Razie Mah’s e-books, The First Singularity and It’s Fairy Tale Trace (for a technical proposal) and An Archaeology of the Fall (for a dramatic rendering), available at smashwords and other e-book venues.

0235 With that said, I thank Steven Mithen for publishing a book that can be fruitfully read both explicitly and implicitly.

Also, the story does not end here, because this examination plays a prominent role in the next commentary, Looking at Julian Jaynes’s Book (1976) “The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.