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0 pointslynguist2y ago0 comments

1. Try selling soap blocks and porno comics to an Amazon tribe or Australian native. Do they have "sell"? Do they need soap blocks? Do they need porno comics? It’s very narrow how you paint it.

2. Behavioral modernity in humans including the way we use language is thought to have emerged 70000-55000 years ago. You can’t go further back and expect to be understood.

3. Humans keep changing. The domestication of the dog ca. 28000-26000 years ago also changed the human brain by turning the dog into our wild senses.

4. Humans self-domesticated themselves the past 6000 years. Human brains show the same changes that domesticated cows have versus wild cattle species. Have you noticed that you can stay in a room with 50 strangers and not attack or sexually assault anyone? This same change led to the development of civilizations.

5. Your thought experiment only really makes sense if you go the furthest, say 12000 years back. Trade might not make sense to humans before.

6. Humans still keep changing.

7. Culture is more diverse than you think. By far more diverse. Just an example: Among human tribes across the globe 40% practice kissing, 60% never kiss. Your concepts will not translate.

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syllogism2y ago

> Behavioral modernity in humans including the way we use language is thought to have emerged 70000-55000 years ago.

Citation for that? There's clear evolutionary selection for language capabilities a long time before that isn't here?

getoffmycase2y ago

I question a lot of the info in comment. Specifically the “humans domesticated themselves 6000years ago.” We had characteristics of “domesticating ourselves” long before 6000 years ago. Non-pronounced canines, reduced sexual dimorphism between males and females, are all hallmarks of a transition from a mating system that was “tournament based” (one male wins all the females) to a more pair-bonded species, although it’s a spectrum and humans have behavior related to both.

This was probably co-evolving with the cost of raising a human child. Which we didn’t just magically start doing 6000 years.

Classic example of the bullshit asymmetry principle, where it took me two paragraphs of text to reasonably dispute a one sentence off hand, inaccurate comment

agmand2y ago

Two notes on language and self-domestication: - 77kya is very late for the emergence of language (though how far it can be traced is still object of heavy debate and nuance). The tenuous consensus nowadays is that the last common ancestor with the Neanderthal/Denisovan branch had at the very least a partial capability of language. 'Behavioral modernity' is also a bit of a red herring on its own, in light of discoveries like this and how similar Neanderthals were to us in terms of archaeological record. - Re self-domestication... The concept is very messy and disputed (I've largely given up on its usefulness, in fact). But in any case 6kya is too late, simply because all modern humans are prosocial, as parent comment said.

Source: human evolution PhD, I have worked in faculty of language evolution, prosociality, genetic basis for self-domestication.

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