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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

#81

Post by 1024core »

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…

Isn't writing barely 10,000 years old or so? For the longest time, humans memorized their stories and passed them down to younger generations by rote memorization.

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

#82

Post by com2kid »

vinceguidry wrote: post #70
kjkjadksj wrote: post #13

It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion. Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the wo…

There has been a LOT of research on this. A popsci book I've read on the topic is Adam's Tongue. It details the features that separate what's called Animal Communication Systems from human language. https://www.amazon.com/Adams-Tongue-Humans-Made-Language-ebo... Obviously pets are quite capable of making their wishes known to us, especially if we facilitate it. It's unclear whether they're actually achieving language…

I had a dog that you could ask to do complex tasks and he'd happily go about and do it.

"Go around the corner and get your toy out of the laundry basket".

He'd go around the corner and get his toy out of the laundry basket.

You could also ask him to get dressed (he'd get his rain coat and do his best to put it on) and you could ask him to get other dogs ready to go (he'd grab their leashes and drape the leash around the other dog's necks).

> Not independently developed in the wild.

I'm pretty sure the crows who live next to my house have a complex language. Different squawks for different circumstances. I can tell when one is addressing me vs when the male is calling to his partner.

> And even if they were, it would be language we taught them.

Humans smarted their way into a surplus of food, which allowed us to do lots of other cool things like have time for art, language, and spending years and years raising our young.

That doesn't mean we are inherently superior, it just means an excess of food allows plenty of time to do non-food related things.

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

#83

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

AIPedant wrote: post #73
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women, and if you really feel the need to use "blonde" as your adjective, but insist it's a sexless "person", then how about "blonde engineer" instead of "blonde dancer"?! I've got nothing against blonde dancers, and am far from politically correct myself, but in a scientific article about language and Bonobos, couldn't they have chosen a more approp…

No, because "bad dancer" is used to illustrate meaning changing in a complex way; it is a person who is bad at dancing, not a bad person who is dancing. Whereas "bad banana" is a bad banana; "bad" operates the same way as "yellow" on "banana", but "bad" and "blonde" operate differently on "dancer." Really seems like you're trying to enforce your own form of political correctness here - "PC" is associated with certain…

Surely bad and blonde (not intended to imply gender) are just adjectives - a dancer who is bad (at dancing), or a dancer who is blonde?

Trust me, if you met me you would not be suggesting I am PC - but this really jumped off the page at me. Such a strange example for this context!

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

#84

Post by mattdeboard »

Retric wrote: post #75
mattdeboard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ants, but that’s a whole other discussion around what constitutes writing. Which is why people look into specific elements of language not just huge generalizations.

Interesting comment. Why ants? Do they use symbols to express complex ideas to each other?

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

#85

Post by mattdeboard »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #52
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…

By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic. However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level. I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point…

Cave drawings throughout the American southwest demonstrate Native Americans of antiquity were just as capable of expressing symbolic thought via a durable medium to express meaning to other humans as so-called modern humans.

I know I'm arguably moving the goalposts here from "writing stuff down for others to read" to "using symbols on a durable medium to express meaning to other humans." But that's a category of behavior that writing belongs to so I don't think it's logically inconsistent. :)

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

#86

Post by mattdeboard »

earleybird wrote: post #74
glenstein wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. The Cherokee had an extremely well developed written tradition, so I don't think that inference would follow at all.

From the early 1800's, created by a single person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

Awesome. A truly impressive feat that, among all the various and sundry species populating the earth, is only achievable by a human. That is exactly my point... thank you! :)

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

#87

Post by mattdeboard »

gnulinux wrote: post #32
jcranmer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 as…

great point about our "biomorphology" being a perhaps-essential building block of the uniquely human ability to convey information symbolically for later retrieval.

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

#88

Post by mattdeboard »

darksaints wrote: post #63
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…

Writing is a new phenomenon. It's certainly a novel ability, but genetically we were around for a few million years before we even developed civilization, tens of thousands more before behavioral modernity, and only in the last 10k years have we developed writing. But other commenters have already said as much. I would contest that what makes us unique is recursion as a general ability. In that sense, writing is a me…

Chimps and crows are documented using tools to make tools. Crows in particular can make compound tools. Orangs make cutting tools out of two rocks they pound together.

Neither tool use nor manufacture is uniquely human!

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

#89

Post by bobthepanda »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #52
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…

By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic. However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level. I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point…

I don't think this really holds. we know, for example, that there were precolombian civilizations that wrote things down like the Maya and the Aztec, though much of it was destroyed during colonization.

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

#90

Post by mattdeboard »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #60
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…

The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire. By a strict definition of writing (e.g. what we're doing now), people have only been able to write for a few thousand years, and much of the adult population was illiterate until recently. Define it widely enough (visual communication of information), and some other animals (e.g. tigers) also "write": https://animalresearcher.com/why-…

Re: oral transmission , I'm operating under the (unsubstantiated) assumption at least some species of dolphins and whales, at least, are conveying "tribal" information orally between generations (locations of reliable hunting grounds, stuff like that). There's no definitive proof of this, afaik, it's just something that seems likelier than not to me.

Re: defining it broadly... The definition I've landed on thru defending my stated belief in these comments is, "Conveying information symbolically by etching it into or onto a durable medium so it can be referred to later."

But I guess an important quality of "writing" is that it's information that could otherwise be communicated with spoken language, and that the written and spoken languages are isomorphic.. maybe?

Honestly this is the first time I've put this idea out into the world for criticism so I'm still working thru these things :)

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