Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Language Hard-Wired in the Brain?
Message-ID: <petrichDxJzDy.8t7@netcom.com>
Keywords: language origin
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Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 05:32:22 GMT
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	[Hohn Halloran on preadaptation...]

	Yes, I know what that is :-)

	Why not check on some studies of coevolution some time? 
Considering step-by-step development makes it unnecessary to posit 
all-at-once preadaptation.

	We do have some adaptations for producing language, such as the 
opening of the trachea into the throat being dangerously low, this 
because of a danger of choking. In apes, for example, this opening is in 
the rear of the mouth, making it much more difficult to choke -- and this 
is the arrangement that human babies have. This arrangement makes it 
difficult to produce many speech sounds (teaching apes to make human 
speech sounds has been very disappointing), which may be why the current 
arrangement evolved in our species.

	One difficulty of following the evolution of this feature is that 
soft parts do not get preserved very well; are there any sign of skeletal 
traces?

	Since this feature is universal across our species, and since this
feature has the awkward side effect of making choking easy, this makes
John Halloran's hypothesis that our species was without spoken language
until 10,000 years ago *extremely* implausible. 

-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
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