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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

#101

Post by tombh »

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…

Whilst some here are critiquing this point of view due to writing's recency, there's actually some academic support for the ancient impact of "archival" if we can consider a broader definition for it, namely: linguistic works such as stories, poems, songs etc. A classic study of this is Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/Ong_Walter_J_Orality_and_Li...

The basic idea is that say, lyrics, are a technological innovation that "stores" information across time and space because it aides in recall.

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

#102

Post by quickthrowman »

mattdeboard wrote: post #92
quickthrowman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I follow, which other animals have cities and agriculture?

Bees.

I never even considered insects but bees are a perfect example, I can see where you’re coming from now. A hive as a city, honey as a crop they farm by collecting pollen and refining it. There’s even specialized roles and a class hierarchy, just like humans! Ants build nests that could similarly be considered cities as well.

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

#103

Post by BirAdam »

ang_cire wrote: post #99
nkrisc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone denies that communication is not unique to humans. It is clearly not. But what is (apparently - as far as we know) unique to humans is language, meaning the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined…

> the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in their own mind. We don't know that animals can't. We know that some animals can convey detailed…

I was going to mention this as well. Further, I remember reading dolphins being capable of similar feats. I also remember hearing about regional animals dialects.

Any animals capable of providing accurate descriptions of things to one another would have to be using something like language. It would require both some kind symbolic thought and structure of those symbols whether they be auditory, visual, or a combination of the two.

If people want to use “language” for humans alone, okay… but it is quite clear that some animals use a communication system nearly as complex if not equivalent.

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

#104

Post by mkl »

> Now we have evidence that both chimps and bonobos have syntax, it is inevitable that this capacity for compositionality was inherited from our last common ancestor, says Leroux. “They just showed, unambiguously, that this core building block is evolutionary ancient and at least 7 million years old, and maybe even older.”

This is not true at all. It's like saying that tool construction must be >300 million years old because both chimpanzees and New Caledonian crows make tools. Things can be invented or discovered multiple times by different species. It might be inherited from a common source, but it might not.

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

#105

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #40
ghc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Austr…

The question is whether or not cultures that had no writing systems were limited to the same level of intelligence and/or development that other primates exhibit.

Given that with exception of an interesting knot-encoded (Quipu) system for some period of the Inca empire, the entire human population of the Americas (at least 15-20% of the total human population) fits this description, the answer seems to be "no". These cultures built huge cities (among the largest in the world at the time), used sophisticated irrigation schemes, ceramics technology and more.

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

#106

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

Agree with most of what you're saying here, but:

> 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.

We just don't know if this is true.

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

#107

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mattdeboard wrote: post #86
earleybird wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! :)

But also not a part of the human experience among all the ancestors of the Cherokee people, or more or less all humans in the Americas, all the way back to whenever humans first arrived in the Americas (likely 25k-30k years ago, at least).

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

#108

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

There are dozens (maybe even hundreds) of human cultures that existed at the time Homer was writing, or when Gilgamesh was written, that also have no equivalent.

The idea that any roughly equivalent human culture will develop the same things is clearly wrong. Just look at the plough - for centuries or even millenia, humans outside of what is now China had ploughs but failed to gain the insight to improve it in the way it was improved in China. Once trade exposed them to the Chinese plough, it was more or less universally adopted within decades.

While multiple (re)invention may be common, it is not universal. Just because culture A manages to find is way to cultural/technological innovation doesn't imply that culture B will, even if the two cultures are very similar.

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

#109

Post by geoelectric »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #83
AIPedant wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The fact you had to clarify "at dancing" is why they're different.

Think about it as a decomposition where "dancer" means "dancing person."

In the simple case, both "blonde" and "dancing" separately modify "person." If you diagram that it’s a Y: either modifier could be removed without changing the meaning of the other, and their order isn’t important.

In the complex case, "bad" modifies "dancing," which together modify "person." That’s an ordered chain, which is more complex to build and comprehend. Your clarification illustrates the chaining and why it’d be a fundamentally different meaning if that wasn’t understood.

I’m not even touching whatever you were going for with the blonde/brunette thing. It's plain they used the example because there's no possible way hair color could be a modifier for "dancing," and they wanted something unambiguous.

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

#110

Post by foltik »

empath75 wrote: post #16
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…

Language is not just "communication" and not every communication is language. Bees and ants communicate information chemically, but they're not using a structured language. Dogs may growl to intimidate or yelp if they get hurt, and that surely communicates information, but whether they are using a structured language is a matter of research.

But isn’t what whatever we call language just a few more levels of recursion in fundamentally the same continuous process?
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