Speech sounds

562-532 thousand years ago

Below are some reflections on language. There will be plenty more in days to come. For a science-fictional take on language, try Octavia Butler’s account of a world where language has disappeared, Speech Sounds. It’s one of her best. It won science fiction’s Hugo Award for best short story in 1984.

We’re now six months through the year 2016 at Logarithmic History. We raced through time at the rate of 754 million years a day on January 1. December 31 we’ll cover just one year per day. Today, June 30, covers 30,714 years, from 562,439 to 5531,726 years ago.

By today’s date, the universe is a lot more complicated than when we started. As we mentioned before, one of the major sources of complexity is the origin of new discrete combinatorial systems, made of small units that can be combined into larger units that have different properties than their constituents. Elementary particles are the first discrete combinatorial system to appear, already present in the early moments of the Big Bang. The different chemical elements are another major discrete combinatorial system. It took billions of years for enough heavy atoms, beyond hydrogen and helium, to accumulate from stellar explosions, allowing the complex chemistry and geology that we know on Earth. It may be that the paucity of heavy elements in the early Universe is what prevented earlier planetary systems from developing complex life.

With the origin of life comes another discrete combinatorial systems, or rather two connected systems: nucleotides strung together to make genes, which code for amino acids strung together to make proteins.

For the second half of the Logarithmic History year, we’ll be spending a lot of time looking at the consequences of another discrete combinatorial system: language. Or maybe, as with genes-and-proteins there are really two systems here: words strung into phrases and sentences, and concepts strung together into complex propositions in a Language of Thought.

The origin of modern human is one of the major transitions in evolution, comparable to the origin of eukaryotic cells, or of social insects. Language is crucial here: ants organize high levels of cooperation by secreting pheromones. Humans organize by secreting cosmologies.

It’s a small world after all!

592-560 thousand years ago

The story of human origins is partly a story of Big Things like the Taming of Fire and the Dawn of Speech. But it’s also the story of some odd byways and quiddities. A nice introduction to some of these is Chip Walter’s book Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human. (His more recent Last Ape Standing is good too.) Walters considers funny bits of anatomy like our unique big toes and thumbs, and funny bits of behavior like our habits of laughing, weeping, and kissing. Toes and thumbs fossilize, but behaviors can be hard to date, evolutionarily. Presumably these behaviors appeared sometime before modern humans evolved and spread, so let’s pick today’s date. It’s also hard to figure out the exact evolutionary rationale for some of these behaviors. Humor, for example, is not a simple phenomenon: intellectually appreciating a joke, actually finding it funny and enjoying it, and finally laughing, each involve separate areas of the brain.

Laughter, specifically, is a minor human oddity that sheds an interesting light on some big events in human evolution. Robert Provine, a leading laughter researcher, spells out the argument in “Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccuping, and Beyond.” Chimpanzees have a kind of laugh, a modified vocalized panting synchronized with inhalation and exhalation. Presumably laughter first resulted when panting-during-play evolved into a play signal. But the short bursts of human laughter go further, having freed themselves from synchrony with the inhalation/exhalation cycle. Laughter, in other words, is just one instance of the more general phenomenon of humans having separate controls for vocalization and for respiration. Interestingly, the most prominent examples of complex vocalization – songbirds and some other birds, whales, bats, and humans – are all found in non-quadrupeds. In quadrupeds, breathing is tightly coupled with locomotion: lungs need to be full to stiffen the thorax when the forelimbs hit the ground. Giving up quadrupedalism seems to have allowed for an “adaptive release” in the evolution of vocal abilities in a number of unrelated lineages. So the study of laughter (and other vocalizations) suggests that two key human adaptations – bipedalism and spoken language – are more closely linked than one might have expected.

Another and overlapping set of human particularities involves facial expressions of the emotions. Darwin got a whole book out of this. He concluded (admittedly based on somewhat anecdotal methods) that different emotional expressions are largely innate. It’s an interesting illustration of his ability to reason from small facts to large conclusions that he also drew a big conclusion about human evolution from this. In Darwin’s day, there were scientists who believed that different human races had evolved from very different prehuman progenitors: one prehuman species giving rise to Europeans, another to Africans, and so on. But Darwin reasoned that the very close similarity in facial expressions (and he had traveled a lot, and witnessed a lot of expressions in a lot of places) and the very similar emotional makeup of humans around the world was evidence that human populations shared a fairly recent common ancestry. Here as in several other cases, a mixture of close reasoning and sheer luck led Darwin to the correct conclusion about evolution long before there was much solid evidence.

Darwin’s work on emotions was neglected for most of the twentieth century by anthropologists favoring a blank slate view of human behavior, but was eventually largely vindicated by a number of researchers, notably Paul Ekman. There is now good evidence for six basic facially expressed emotions: Fear, Disgust, Joy, Anger, Sadness, and Surprise.

If you’re a movie watcher, this list may seem familiar. These emotions (all except for Surprise) are all depicted as little homunculi living inside the head of an 11 year old girl in the animated feature “Inside Out.” (The movie gets a strong thumbs up from Logarithmic History). Somebody at Pixar Studios knows their Ekman.

So the sappy song is right: There is just one moon and one golden sun, and a smile means friendship to everyone.

Homo heidelbergensis

629-595 thousand years ago

By 600 thousand years ago we’re finding people who don’t fit comfortably into Homo erectus. A jawbone from around this time was unearthed in Germany, near Heidelberg, in 1907, and is sometimes assigned to a new species, Homo heidelbergensis. Another find from the same period, often assigned to the same species, comes from Bodo, Ethiopia (below).

This guy clearly isn’t modern Homo sapiens, but his brain is starting to get out of the Homo erectus range (1200 cubic centimeters cranial capacity), and his browridge is a double arch, rather than an erectus-style straight bar. He’s also got cut marks on skull and face, from someone “defleshing” him.

For a long time, we could tell a story about how Homo heidelbergensis was the ancestor to both modern humans and Neanderthals, but the latest DNA calibration suggests the split may go back earlier. We’re not really sure that all the specimens assigned to heidelbergensis really were one species.

Ice Age gear shift

833-788 thousand years ago

Around today’s date, there was a shift in the nature of glacial cycles.

But let’s back up a bit. Earth’s climate took a turn toward cool in the transition from Eocene to Oligocene, 35 million years ago (although with some warming in the Miocene). It was probably back then that much of Antarctica started being covered by ice. The establishment of open water all the way around Antarctica may have helped isolate and freeze the continent. And declining carbon dioxide levels, partly a result of weathering of rocks in the Himalayas, probably also made a difference. But it was back at the beginning of the Pleistocene, now dated to 2.5 million years ago, that the current Ice Age truly began, with glaciers covering large parts of northern North America and northern Europe.

Current Ice Age? Glaciers covering large parts of northern North America and northern Europe? This isn’t what the climate has been like for the past 10,0000 years. Within the current long Ice Age there have been long glacial periods and shorter interglacials, and we’re currently in an interglacial. Our own activities may have done something to prolong the interglacial, and stave off the return of the ice; more on this another day.

Three astronomical cycles govern the rhythm of glacial and interglacial. There’s a 100,000 year cycle as Earth’s orbit changes from somewhat more elliptical to somewhat more circular. There’s a 40,000 year cycle as Earth’s axis shifts from slightly more tilted (24.5 degrees off vertical) to slightly less (22.1 degrees). It’s currently tilted at 23.5 degrees. And there’s a 21,000 year cycle generated as the Earth precesses – wobbles like a top. Right now the North Pole is pointed at Polaris, and the Sun very recently started rising in the constellation Aquarius at the Spring equinox: hence the Age of Aquarius.

Between 2.5 million and 800,000 years ago, the glacial/interglacial alternation was dominated by the 40,000 year cycle. But beginning about 800,000 years, there has been a gear shift: the 100,000 year cycle has been dominant and swings in climate have been more extreme. (In Africa however the 21,000 year cycle is more important for alternations between rainy and dry. Africa is in a dry state now.)

One of the startling findings to come out of the last few decades of work on ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica is that not only have there have been huge long-term changes in climate, but there have also been extreme short term shifts, probably connected with changes in ocean currents. There have been a number of occasions over the last hundreds of thousands of years during which average temperatures shifted by 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit (5-10 degrees Celsius) for a millennium, or even for a century or less! (During the last 10,000 years, however, the climate has been unusually stable.)

This is bound to have had strong effects on human beings. Two anthropologists, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, who work on mathematical models of cultural evolution, have a general theory of how this pattern of oscillations might have affected human evolution. They argue that human adaptation takes place on multiple time scales. On very long time scales, human beings adapt to changes in the environment genetically. On very short time scale, human beings adapt to change through individual learning. But when change happens on intermediate time scales, adaptation takes place through social learning. With changes on intermediate time scales, your ancestors may not have enough time to adapt genetically to the current climate, but things may be stable for long enough that your culture and the wisdom of the elders have a lot to teach you about how to cope. So one of the really distinctive features of human beings – we are, more than any other creature, a cultural animal – may have been shaped by the nature of climate change especially over the last 800,000 years.

Antecessor rising

932-882 kya (thousand years ago)

A common way of demeaning another group is to call them cannibals. Roman pagans sometimes accused early Christians of cannibalizing infants during their secret ceremonies (a horror-show misreporting of the Christian Mass?) Later on, medieval Christians sometimes accused Jews of murdering Christian infants and mixing their blood into Passover matzohs. In response to such libels, anthropologists have sometimes swung to the opposite extreme, occasionally even denying that cannibalism (other than emergency survival cannibalism) was ever an established practice. But there is no serious doubt that human populations have sometimes practiced cannibalism, sometimes in the very recent past. In 1961, for example, Michael Rockefeller, traveling in search of tribal art, was killed and eaten by a group on the coast of New Guinea.

At the Grand Dolina site in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain, the fragmentary remains of 6 people, mostly children, were discovered mixed in with animal bones and stone tools. Animal and human remains were treated the same. In both cases, cut marks show that flesh was cut from the bones. There’s no evidence that the human remains received any specially respectful treatment. Cannibalism is the most plausible explanation.

The researchers involved have proposed a new species name, Homo antecessor, for these and some other early European finds, although not everybody buys this.

Quest for fire

1,043-986 thousand years ago

What really distinguishes humans from other animals? We’ve covered some of the answers already, and will cover more in posts to come. But certainly one of the great human distinctions is that we alone use fire. Fire is recognized as something special not just by scientists, but in the many myths about how humans acquired fire. (It ain’t just Prometheus.) Claude Lévi-Strauss got a whole book out of analyzing South American Indian myths of how the distinction between raw and cooked separates nature from culture. (I admit this is where I get bogged down on Lévi-Strauss.)

Until recently the story about fire was that it came late, toward the latter days of Homo erectus. But Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, turned this around with his book Catching Fire (which is not the same as this book), arguing that the taming of fire goes back much earlier, to the origin of Homo erectus. Wrangham argues that it was cooking in particular that set us on the road to humanity. Cooking allows human beings to extract much more of energy from foods (in addition to killing parasites). Homo erectus had smaller teeth and jaw than earlier hominins and probably a smaller gut, and it may have been fire that made this possible. Cooking is also likely to have affected social life, by focusing eating and socializing around a central place. (E O Wilson thinks that home sites favored intense sociality in both social insects and humans.)

Surviving on raw food is difficult for people in a modern high-tech environment and probably impossible for people in traditional settings. Anthropologists are always looking for human universals, and almost always finding exceptions (e.g. the vast majority of societies avoid regular brother-sister marriage, but there are a few exceptions). But cooking seems to be a real, true universal. No society is known where people got by without cooking. Tasmanians, isolated from the rest of the world for 10,000 years, with the simplest technology of any people in recent history, had lost the art of making fire, but still cooked.

Recent archeological finds have pushed the date for controlled use of fire back to 1 million years ago (see today’s tweet on Wonderwerk cave), but not all the way back to the origin of Homo erectus. This doesn’t mean Wrangham is wrong. Fire sites don’t always preserve very well: we have virtually no archeological evidence of the first Americans controlling fire, but nobody doubts they were doing it. It could be that it will be the geneticists who will settle this one. The Maillard (or browning) reaction that gives cooked meat much of its flavor generates compounds that are toxic to many mammals but not (or not so much) to us. At some point we may learn just how far back genetic adaptations to eating cooked food go.

An alternative to an early date for fire, there is the recent theory that processing food, by chopping it up and mashing it with stone tools, was the crucial early adaptation.

Whenever it is exactly that humans started cooking, the date falls in (Northern hemisphere) grilling season on Logarithmic History, so you can celebrate the taming of fire accordingly. It doesn’t have to be meat you grill. Some anthropologists think cooking veggies was even more important. I recommend sliced eggplant particularly, brushed with olive oil to keep it from sticking, and with salt, pepper, and any other spices.

And here, if it’s your kind of thing, is Iron Maiden doing Quest for Fire.

My handaxe

1.31-1.23 million years ago

By today’s date, Acheulean tools are well developed in Africa, and found in India too. Sophisticated tools like the Acheulean hand axe probably tell us something not just about cognition in relation to tool making, but also about social cognition. You wouldn’t make a hand axe, use it, and abandon it. Nor would you go to all the trouble if the biggest, baddest guy in the group was immediately going to grab it from you. So there is probably some notion of artifacts-as-personal-possessions by the time Acheulean appears.

Possession is a social relationship, a relationship between two or more individuals with respect to the thing possessed. Robinson Crusoe didn’t “own” anything on his island before Friday came along.

Linguists have noted something interesting about the language of possession that maybe tells us something about the psychology of possession: Expressions for possession are often similar to expressions for spatial locations. Compare spatial expressions:

João went to Recife.
Chico stayed in Rio.
The gang kept Zezinho in Salvador.

and corresponding constructions for possessions:

The Crampden estate went to Reginald.
The Hampden estate stayed with Lionel.
Thag kept axe.

Of course the Crampden estate didn’t go anywhere in physical space, but it still traveled in the abstract social space of possession. In some cases just switching from inanimate to animate subject will switch the meaning from locative to possessive. The Russian preposition y means at/near when applied to a place (People are at Nevsky street) but possession when applied to a person (Hat is “at” Ivan = Ivan has hat.)

What may be going on here: people (and many other creatures) have some mental machinery for thinking about physical space. That machinery gets retooled/borrowed/exapted for thinking about more abstract relationships. So the cognitive psychology of space gets retooled for thinking about close and distant social relationships, or time ahead and behind. In other words, we may be seeing a common evolutionary phenomenon of organs evolved for one purpose being put to another purpose – reptile jaw bones evolve into mammalian inner ear bones, dinosaur forelimbs evolve into bird wings. You can find Steve Pinker making this argument in his book The Stuff of Thought. For a while most of the evidence of repurposing spatial cognition for more abstract relationships came from linguistics, but there’s now some corroboration from neurology.

And I’ve made the argument for the particular case of kinship: regularities in kin terminology across cultures tell us something about pan-human ideas of “kinship space.” (My kin and my body parts are arguably the most basic, intrinsic primitive sorts of possessions, since long before my handaxe.) This implies that the evolutionary psychology of kinship has not just an adaptive component (adaptations for calculating coefficients of relatedness and inbreeding), but also a phylogenetic component  (homologies with the cognitive psychology of space).

 

We’ll see other possible examples, involving e.g. the evolution of speech sounds, as we move along.

What do women want?

As we noted in the last post, human females conceal ovulation (no chimp-style monthly sexual swellings) but advertise nubility (with conspicuous fat deposits). Presumably this has to do with sexual selection, via male mate choice. But sexual selection may have operated in the opposite direction, on male anatomy, as well.

Males of most primate species have a baculum, or penis bone. Human beings and spider monkeys are the exceptions. (A mnemonic: the mammals with penis bones are PRICCs – primates, rodents, insectivores, carnivores, chiropterans=bats.) The baculum helps to retract the penis when it’s not in use, so males in our species, lacking a penis bone, have more conspicuous dangling organs than most primate males.

This information comes from a recent book The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World ­– and Us, by Robert Prum. Prum also cites a paper arguing that Adam’s “rib” (Hebrew tsela), the thing God used to make Eve (Genesis 2:21-23), was actually his baculum, providing a creationist explanation of “congenital human baculum deficiency.” The book contains lots of interesting tidbits like this, but its central argument – that sexual selection via mate choice is largely a result of non-adaptive aesthetic preferences – is shaky.

Men’s penises lack something else found in most primate species: most male primates have keratinized spines on their penises. But a gene involved in the development of penis spines got turned off in our evolutionary lineage, some time after our split with chimps, but before our split with Neanderthals. We’re not sure why. Penis spines might be favored in promiscuously mating species if they help one male dredge out sperm left by earlier matings with other males. So (relative) monogamy in our lineage might remove the evolutionary advantage of spines. But a non-spiny penis might also be less sensitive, and make for more prolonged intercourse.

If all this doesn’t answer the question “What do women want?”, it at least narrows down the possibilities a bit: not men with bony, spiny penises, apparently.

Calories and curves

This figure is from a neat recent paper comparing energy expenditure (TEE or Total Energy Expended) and fat among humans and our closest relations: chimpanzees (genus Pan), gorillas (Gorilla), and orangutans (Pongo). (The numbers are adjusted for differences in overall body mass.)

What stands out here is that humans are a high energy species. Also we carry a lot more body fat than the other great apes. This applies particularly to women, who need a lot of extra fat to meet the high energy demands of human infants. But it even applies to men. For both sexes, a high energy life style means you want to carry around an extra reserve of fat in case of emergencies.

We don’t know how long ago our ancestors decided to crank up their energy consumption. Maybe back with the rise of Homo erectus (just a few days ago on Logarithmic History). Or maybe later, when the typical modern human pattern of slow maturation was more firmly in place. At some point in the near future, we’ll actually nail down the specific genetic changes leading humans to accumulate more fat, and be able to put a date on the change. It may be that the distinctively human mating system also arose back then, with human females concealing ovulation (no chimp-style monthly sexual swellings) but advertising nubility (with conspicuous fat deposits).

A high energy life-style also goes with extensive food sharing, and changes in human kinship.

Handaxe

From around 1.4 million years ago, Acheulean hand axes appear in Africa. They will eventually show up in southwest Europe and as far east as India. Hand axes were long thought to be absent from further east, but now have been found sporadically in East Asia. Wear analyses show that hand axes, “the Swiss Army knife of the Paleolithic,” were used for a variety of purposes: cutting wood, slicing meat, scraping hides.

The hand axe implies a great leap forward cognitively from earlier Oldowan tools (although you can flay an elephant with Oldowan flakes). People (let’s call them people) were not just choosing the right material and making the right hand movements, but choosing the right shape of stone, and imagining the hand axe inside it before they started.

Dietrich Stout, an experimental anthropologist at Emory University, has trained students to make modern-day Acheulean handaxes, and monitored their brains as they learn. (The students’ axes, after months of practice, still aren’t as good as the real thing.) See the video below: