The story of the human body lieberman chapter summary
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This results in an information transfer rate that is agonizingly slow. Although there have been many attempts to devise systems that allow humans to communicate using sound-such as Morse code, tones, and musical notes-such systems require listeners to pay undivided attention in order to interpret the sequence of sounds and their meanings. Speech is a special mode of communication, providing a rapid rate of information transfer necessary for complex language. Over time, these changes made us “human”-we may have actually talked ourselves into being smarter! Speech And Speech Physiology In other words, as our ancestors grappled with improved modes of speaking to each other, their brains gradually developed more complex language skills, allowing us to form and comprehend complex syntax. This is an important clue to understanding the evolution of human language because it indicates that our modern brains may actually have been shaped by an enhanced capacity for speech motor control that evolved in our ancestors. For example, these circuits allow us to change the direction of our thought processes based on new stimuli such as the understanding of meaning conveyed by the syntax of language. In most animals such circuits regulate the motor control of the body, but in modern humans they also affect our cognitive abilities. Rather than being localized in one part of our brain-as was traditionally thought in the 19th century-we now know that the neural bases of speech and language are actually found in the “circuits” that connect different parts of the brain. When we look at our brains the neural mechanisms necessary to produce fully articulate speech are intricately connected to the regulation of complex syntax and cognition.
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That building block may have been something as simple as speech, the vocal transmission of information at a very fast rate.
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In fact, the appearance of modern human bodies well before the appearance of what we consider to be modern human behavior- our higher mental processes such as complex thought, language, and symbolic behavior-suggests that there was something about our early modern ancestors that allowed them to develop into our more recent, fully modern selves. The appearance of these attributes relatively late in our evolution-well after our species originated about 200,000 years ago-has important implications for how we think about ourselves, our ancestors, and our collateral relatives (including the Neanderthals who evolved separately from our common ancestor starting about 500,000 years ago). Yet the mark of our evolution may be discerned in our modern bodies, brains, and even our vocal tracts.Įvidence from seemingly unrelated disciplines suggests that the specialized anatomy and neural mechanisms that confer fully human speech, language, and cognitive ability reached their present state sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. Unfortunately, apart from their sometimes fossilized bones and archaeological traces of their behavior, nothing remains of our distant ancestors. In 1973 Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” This dictum applies equally well to human language and speech, which have an evolutionary history that has yet to be fully discovered.