and then spend most of their time arguing about it?
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Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
21–30 of 141 posts
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#22If bonobos start using syntax, it’s only a matter of time before they demand a seat at the dinner table and correct my grammar mid-banana.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#23Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
Thanks for validating my data-hoarding tendencies.
I'm just following my Homo Archivium genetic programming.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#24Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
> calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress"
It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who learned sign language have supposedly never done so.
To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have information that you don't, and you can access it in their writings or give them information with yours. If you can't conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make sense at all.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#25> They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation. > To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established…
If you make that cloud exist in a high enough number of dimensions you'll find yourself emulating a machine learning language model. :)
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#26Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true.
We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation.
Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories.
Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ .
I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#27Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
I’d love for that to be true, but our species dates back 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago.
Writing is definitely not a fundamental trait of our species, although once we got this update, things started moving quickly.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#28they're called Large Language Monkeys
In the article it says that “This finding doesn’t mean that bonobos have language, though”.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#29Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
How do you explain the advancement of cultural practices and tools during the 95% of time (assuming 100k years) that behaviorally modern humans lived prior to inventing writing 5,000 years ago? This includes the invention of agriculture and large scale building projects like Gobleki Tepe and so on. Also, there were cities for thousands of years before writing was invented.
I’m definitely no scholar, just a guy that is interested in prehistory.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#30Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
> rather the fact we write down what we know
Writing is a very recent invention, about 5-6kya for the oldest known script, and effectively one of the last inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya, and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest domestication of crops and animals.
Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over literate Mayan city-states and still not adopt any writing or proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make you ask "what is a writing system?").