Deacon’s challenge: from calls to words

Abstract

A Darwinian theory of the evolution of language must be incremental: to explain the transition from a hominin baseline with great ape grade communicative capacities to language-equipped hominins as a series of small steps. This paper takes up that project for the special case of words, giving an incremental model of the call to word transition. The model is embedded in a general conception of human social evolution with independent empirical support, but it also depends on some more specific assumptions about language and about the earlier forms of hominin communication. Given these assumptions, the paper can be no more than a working draft of a more complete theory. Show more