Greetings Economists, On Jun 5, 2007, at 9:07 AM, Charles Brown wrote:
CB: Yes, more like 200,000 years ago.
Doyle; I was thinking about responding to Carrol from a recent book looking at women's role in prehistory. I think your point about language coming before is rather obvious. It's at 40,000 roughly out that we see 'storing' information start to take hold in the populations. Storing information in a weapon goes way way back. That must have something to do with proto-language. And there is after a long period (about a million years ago) a shift toward a new weapons tool kit with more design and use functions. All I think closely allied to language. Then language got stronger, and the symbolic content meaning spread away from work processes like a weapon, to connecting the group by storing information to unite the group. This information storing process is culture. Uniting the group, storing the information outside conversation, multiplying the advantages of using information through sharing that language had already established in regard to food gathering work. We can use the history of writing to go a bit further. Prior to writing they had no way to represent language adequately so the imagery they made was not language. They accumulated information and used it in an un-language like way. The ancestors would not have used weapons as information storage devices, they would have been learning a work process to make weapons. The language facilitated sharing that. Culture was work to store information outside the head. That shift is pretty likely as I described it. But like Carrol says this is not the place to argue about this sort of thing. Doyle
