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Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

newscientist.com

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Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#31

Post by barbazoo »

cpa wrote: post #27
mattdeboard wrote: post #20

Reinforcing 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.

More like 5000 or 6000 years ago at least for permanent writing I'd say? I definitely read about cuneiform tablets and cylinders from 3500BCE.

Before that might have been on wood so we don't know much about it.

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#32

Post by gnulinux »

jcranmer wrote: post #30
mattdeboard wrote: post #20

Reinforcing 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…

> Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society

Isn't this going a bit too far? Sure they didn't have a modern writing system like Mayans, or even proto-writing systems like Inca's quipu but we do have hard evidence of Teotihuacan society communicating language with painted symbols (e.g. findings in La Ventilla). It's unclear to me how we can say they didn't leave writing to future generations (especially assuming probably there were a lot more stuff that was lost to time than we can see)

Also, this comment seems to slightly misunderstand what the GP said imho. Yes writing is a new invention, but e.g. paintings in Lascaux are about 17k years old. Which means even before Catalhoyuk level civilizations, humans were leaving symbols for later generations to look and decipher. This is the same "archival" process GP is talking about. Humans leave a message to future generations. It seems like our biology must prime us to do it, because we see it universally. Whether the messages we leave are writing, painting, music or whatever... humans still produce things for people that'll come after them. But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community. So, perhaps ironically, part of being human-smart is having human-precise hands that can paint/write. Without this ability, we end up like bonobos, elephants, dolphins etc perhaps smart but for all they know their parents were the Adam and Eve.

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#33

Post by mattdeboard »

cpa wrote: post #27
mattdeboard wrote: post #20

Reinforcing 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.

The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#34

Post by jimkleiber »

mattdeboard wrote: post #33
cpa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...

What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#35

Post by mattdeboard »

quickthrowman wrote: post #29
mattdeboard wrote: post #20

Reinforcing 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 i…

I'm not saying there wasn't any cultural advancement prior to the invention of using written language to store information for use by others. Just that there wasn't any human behavior that distinguished it as unique among all other species on earth.

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#37

Post by mattdeboard »

jimkleiber wrote: post #34
mattdeboard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...

What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?

I think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#38

Post by mattdeboard »

ghc wrote: post #26
mattdeboard wrote: post #20

Reinforcing 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…

...but is there another species that writes things down for other individuals in their species to reference?

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#39

Post by [deleted] »

mattdeboard wrote: post #20

Reinforcing 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…

[deleted]

Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

#40

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ghc wrote: post #26
mattdeboard wrote: post #20

Reinforcing 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…

> I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological

In terms of intelligence, yes, but in terms of what we've achieved then "technology" such as writing/archiving certainly has made a massive difference, else we'd be limited to what could be built by passing down oral history and skills passed from one generation to the next, much like Aboriginal Australians.

I suspect that the neurological (& vocal) differences that make us more intelligent than other apes are likely extremely few - more like "fine tuning" differences than anything major.

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