{"id":9617,"date":"2025-09-11T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.raziemah.com\/blog\/?p=9617"},"modified":"2025-05-22T20:15:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T20:15:06","slug":"how-the-voice-gets-added-to-hand-talk-in-human-evolution-part-a1-part-17-of-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raziemah.com\/blog\/?p=9617","title":{"rendered":"How The Voice Gets Added to Hand-Talk In Human Evolution,\u00a0Part A1 (Part 17 of 23)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

0154 What a banner!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0155 The evolutionary anthropologist, Steven Mithen, publishes a book in 2024 with the full title, The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together The Six-Million Year Story Of How Words Evolve<\/em> (BasicBooks: New York).  The book purports to describe the evolution of “language”.  But, what is “language”?  Is language the sole province of speech?  Of course not, deaf communities practice so-called “sign-language”.  I call this practice, “fully linguistic hand-talk”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0156 Despite the reality that language can be performed in two modalities, manual-brachial gesture and voice, Mithen rules out the gestural origins of language<\/em>.  Consequently, he faces the challenge of portraying the vocal origins of language<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0157 The problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider the following comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

0158 Two features are integral to language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is displacement.  “Displacement” means that “the referent of the word does not have to be present”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second is symbolic operations. Symbols are sign-relations whose sign-objects are based on habit, convention, law and so forth.  Within any symbolic order, a symbol must be sufficiently different from any other symbol as to be readily recognized.  A finite set of symbols constitutes a symbolic order.  Symbolic operations constellate within a symbolic order.  One name for such symbolic operations is “grammar”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0159 Archaeological evidence for bipedalism predates 3.5 Myr (million of years ago).  At this time, vocalizations are not only involuntary, but they tell everyone that a referent is present. It is the opposite of displacement.  Vocalizations denote placements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, that means that involuntary calls<\/em> may be labeled indexes, in so far as the call<\/em> indicates a presence<\/em>.  That means that involuntary calls are indexes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, an involuntary call cannot be called a linguistic sign-relation whose sign object is determined by pointing, contiguity, cause and effect and so forth<\/em>.  And, that is an index, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0161 Okay, that may be confusing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vocal calls<\/em> are indexes in the same way that an emergency alarm<\/em> is an index.  The alarm cannot tell me much more than “an emergency is happening”.  That is not displacement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manual-brachial gestures<\/em> can point to something, even when that something is not present (like the location of the sunrise).  Manual-brachial word gestures allow displacement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0162 In regards to symbolic operations, consider taking the metaphor, a word is like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle,<\/em>literally.  Then, say, 1.7 million years before present time, while I am digging tubers with my team, not far from the forest’s edge, a vulture lands in a nearby tree and one of us notices that… uh oh… there is a jaguar in that tree.  The vulture sees the jaguar.  The jaguar eyes the little hominins.  We know why the vulture decides to land<\/em>.  The vulture wants to see what happens<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone gathers what tubers they have<\/em> into leaf-baskets.  The elder of the team signs the following gestures to me and I reply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

0163 Elder signs [point-YOU][image-RUN][point-RIGHT][image-THROW].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then in reply, I say, [point-ME][raise ROCK].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0164 Each iconic and indexal gesture-word has already been honed through usage to be sufficiently different from any other word-gesture (in our team-oriented lexicon) as to be instantly recognized.  So, the imagery and the indications snap together into one Gestalt, shared by both elder and myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, Mithen discusses displacement and grammar, but not in this manner.  He proposes that displacement for the vocal channel involves synaesthesia, that is, cross-modal sensing.  But, how would this apply to the problems faced by teams, while extracting food under dangerous conditions (which Michael Tomasello labels “collaborative obligatory foraging”)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0165 So, what is the key point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mithen claims to be solving a six-million year old process. But, his metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle,<\/em> when taken literally, takes us through the period that stretches from the start of bipedalism to the domestication of fire<\/em>.  This corresponds to Michael Tomasello’s “period two”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, Mithen is not aware that his choice of metaphors<\/em> undermines his claim against the gestural origin of language<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0166 Is that sort of funny?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In what way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technically, before the domestication of fire, hand-talk is protolinguistic.  Each team has its own protolanguage.  Plus, this protolanguage is not fully linguistic because it does not permit grammatically correct counter-intuitive statements, such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[imageTREE][point to EYES][roll EYEs back and forth]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0167 Oh, yes.\u00a0\u00a0Our kind evolves in a surveillance society.\u00a0\u00a0And we are on the menu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trees have eyes and are watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

0154 What a banner! 0155 The evolutionary anthropologist, Steven Mithen, publishes a book in 2024 with the full title, The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together The Six-Million Year Story Of How Words Evolve (BasicBooks: New York).  The book purports to describe the evolution of “language”.  But, what is “language”?  Is language the sole province of speech?  Of course not, deaf communities practice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unveiling-words"],"yoast_head":"\nHow The Voice Gets Added to Hand-Talk In Human Evolution,\u00a0Part A1 (Part 17 of 23) - An Archaeology of the Fall<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.raziemah.com\/blog\/?p=9617\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How The Voice Gets Added to Hand-Talk In Human Evolution,\u00a0Part A1 (Part 17 of 23) - 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