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SUMMARY:Chimpanzee communication\, cooking\, and the evolution of human la
 nguage - Michael Wilson
DTSTART:20131024T120000Z
DTEND:20131024T133000Z
UID:TALK48212@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Bert Vaux
DESCRIPTION:Explaining how and why language evolved in the human lineage r
 emains a difficult and unsolved puzzle. Comparative study of communication
  in other species provides important insights into likely precursors and c
 onstraints for language evolution. Here I discuss recent work on the commu
 nication of chimpanzees\, and draw attention to a currently neglected poss
 ibility for the origin of cortical control over vocal production. Recent a
 nd ongoing work demonstrates that in chimpanzees\, production of vocalizat
 ions depends on factors in the social and ecological contexts. However\, c
 himpanzees (like other nonhuman primates) appear to have extremely limited
  intentional control over the acoustic structure of their vocalizations. I
 n one promising hypothesis\, Deacon (1997) proposed that in the human line
 age\, increased cortical control over vocal production emerged as a byprod
 uct of an increase in the relative size of the prefrontal cortex\, which i
 ncreased the number of axons projecting to the brainstem centers that cont
 rol vocal tract movements. Increasing the size of the prefrontal cortex an
 d other brain areas is generally recognized to require an increase in ener
 gy to fuel these expensive tissues. Deacon and other recent writers on lan
 guage evolution argue that an increase in meat eating is the likely source
  of this fuel. While meat is energetically dense\, it suffers from drawbac
 ks as a primary source of increased energy\, mainly because it is an unrel
 iable windfall food\, even in modern human foragers. An important and more
  reliable likely source of increased energy has been neglected in the lang
 uage evolution literature: cooking and other pre-ingestion processing of f
 ood. I argue that the increased energy made available by cooking likely pl
 ayed a key role in the origin of cortical control over vocal production\, 
 and encourage efforts to test this hypothesis.
LOCATION:room 8\, Lecture Block\, Sidgwick Site
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