Beyond bones & stones
Human language is thought to emerge around 100,000 years ago as an abstract symbolic system. It is very likely that humans spoke long before it they wrote. Because the nature of language is largely spoken, it has been hard to find physical evidence of when and how humans began speaking... Some argue early evidence of... Continue Reading →
About a week ago, I read and posted on a summary piece on cultural evolution research in PLoS Biology. The reviewer introduced me to Simon Kirby's work, which I found remarkable. Kirby and colleagues setup an experiment, one that observed the evolution of an artificial language from a set of random terms to an ordered,... Continue Reading →
In brief, Science has published three news pieces that you maybe interested. They are all reports of what was presented at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting a couple weeks ago. The first, "Snapshots From the Meeting," is a summary of the conference, where Ann Gibbons and Elizabeth Colutta discuss, 'the evolution of gliding,... Continue Reading →
Charles Limb and Allen Braun at Johns Hopkins have recently published a study on the internal characteristics and functions of improvisation in music. The study, "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation," uses a functional MRI to look at the neural activity of Jazz musicians, specifically pianists, during improvisation. Several... Continue Reading →
Fellow blogger, Simon Greenhill of HENRY, and co-authors published a cool paper evaluating language evolution that just came out in today's issue of Science. The premise behind the paper, "Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts," is simple to follow. By comparing related versions, or homologs, of common words between the following language families: Indo-European, Bantu, and... Continue Reading →
FOXP2 is thought to be a language gene. It is highly conserved in most mammals but in humans there are two unique mutations in the protein caused by nucleotide substitutions at positions 911 and 977 of exon 7. It is thought to be a language gene because humans who have one FOXP2 copy have speech... Continue Reading →
Both Nature and PNAS have put out two fascinating papers on the evolution of language. Nature's "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language," studies how grammatical rules change over time, a term the authors call regularization. The authors specifically studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Here's a summary of what they... Continue Reading →
