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.