PhD Candidate : Kusnandar Date : 19-01-2016 Title of Book : Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human Title of Chapter : The Loom of Language Authors : Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin Abstract: In many ways it is language that makes us feel human. Ours is a world of words. Our thoughts, our world of imagination, our communication, our richly fashioned culture – are woven on the loom of language. Quite simply, language is our medium. The capacity of Homo sapiens for rapid and detailed communication, and for richness of thought, is unmatched in today’s world. The challenge for anthropologists is to formulate the right questions about the origin of these skills. Two major issues dominate the origin of language. First is the matter of continuity. Is spoken language merely an extension and enhancement of cognitive capacities to be found among our ape relative or is it a unique human characteristic, completely separate from any cognitive activities in apes? The second issue is function. Did language evolve as a tool of enhanced communication or did evolution select less obvious ability, mediated by language? Because humans are one species, Homo sapiens, there will be an underlying structure common to all languages. The differences we see among the many …show more content…
As a result some systems tend to become more complex through time. This apparent trend is the effect of history in long-term evolutionary change. Brains got bigger at major evolutionary innovations, partly through the development of new sensory channels or the modification of existing ones (and their deeper integration), and partly through the building on existing machinery, a kind of evolutionary leapfrog. The ever-bigger brains, the ever-greater cognitive capacity, that we see through evolutionary time is what we equate with growing-intelligence. Intelligence is a measure of the quality of the particular real world created by the brain of particular