>>Why did we need dogs to develop gesturing. We could gesture to people.<<
But drove forward that development? There is a really cute program on TV here in Japan that shows the adventures of a chimpanzee (who is very socialized to humans) who is paired up with a bull dog. The two animals do communicate, but they have to learn to read each other's body language and gestures. The question here being, does their communication constitute something outside of what chimps usually use, what dogs usually use, to communicate? One particular theory about the possible gestural origins of human language says that humans developed gestural routines and phonetic skills, and the gestural routines basically migrated over to the phonetic realm (we use our faces, vocal tracts and upper body to SPEAK a language). If two species like hominids and wolves interact, it might overall mean that their paths of evolutions only partly converge. A recent development in human-dog development, or at least one that is obvious, is the fairly recent creation of cute, child-like breeds (while the archetypal dog is still wolf-like in appearance--the Alsatian, the Husky, the Japanese Akita, etc.). Has the co-evolutionary story of humans-dogs more or less hit a deadend for both species (with wolves themselves threatened by extinction and the future of dogs totally dependent on humans' abilities to feed and house them). I'm simply speculating that co-evolution with dogs might well have aided the human development of language--both in a cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary sense. Since, for example, groups built around humans and dogs would have had to develop a two-species of communication in order to hunt and herd. If you watch a skilled herder with a skilled border collie, you might see something that is quite analogous or even a holdover from when this sort of interaction was how hominids in the human line of developed lived. CJ -- Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ ELT in Japan http://eltinjapan.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
