0021 Where am I going with this?
According to Comments on Michael Tomasello’s Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) (by Razie Mah and available at smashwords and other e-book venues, also appearing in Razie’s Mah blog for January through March, 2024), hominin evolution can be divided into three stages. The first corresponds to adaptation to the social circle of teams. The second corresponds to adaptation to the social circles of community, mega-band and tribe. The third corresponds to a twist in human evolution.
0022 Another way to imagine the three stages?
The first goes with the evolution of proto-linguistic hand talk, sensible construction and implicit abstraction.
The second goes with the evolution of fully linguistic hand talk, sensible and social construction, and implicit abstraction. Speech is added to hand talk at the commencement of our own species, Homo sapiens. Our species practices a dual-mode way of talking, hand-speech talk, for over 200,000 years, until something happens.
The third goes with a recent twist in human evolution, social (and sensible) construction and explicit (and implicit) abstraction.
0023 A twist?
Before the first singularity, there are no civilizations (actually, there is only constrained social complexity). Plus, all human cultures practice hand-speech talk, as they have for 200,000 years.
The hypothesis of the first singularity proposes that the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia is the first speech-alone talking culture, in a world full of hand-speech talking cultures. Then, speech-alone talk spreads as nearby hand-speech talking cultures imitate the Ubaid, because the Ubaid has something that they don’t have (wealth and power, due to labor and social specialization). Then, as these neighboring cultures drop the hand-component of their hand-speech talk, trends towards unconstrained social complexity increase their wealth and power.
Why does speech-alone talk facilitate unconstrained social complexity?
Speech-alone talk allows explicit abstraction. Hand-talk and hand-speech talk do not.
Today, all civilizations practice speech-alone talk.
0024 Here is a picture of the evolution of talk.
0025 The implications take this examination to a place that the author does not anticipate.
There is more than one meaning to the Latin term, “dici”.
0026 At first, there are only relationes secundum esse. These relations inspire implicit abstraction. If one imagines that every team operates according to its own set of relationes secundum esse, and adapt to those relations, then as the number of teams (or “ways of getting stuff to eat”) increases, so must the mental powers of the hominins increase. One phenotypic expression for the multiplication of specialized mental modules attuned to sets of esse relations is the increase of neocortical size over evolutionary time.
Then, adding to the first, relationes secundum dici (hand talk) begins as members of each team uses manual-brachial gestures to “talk”. The contiguity between a hand-talk word-gesture and its referent involves sensible construction and implicit abstraction.
Then, adding to the first and second, dici (hand talk) becomes linguistic. The contiguity between a fully linguistic hand-talk statement and its meaning involves sensible (and increasingly, social) construction and implicit abstraction.
Speech is added to hand talk at the start of our species, Homo sapiens. Implicit abstractions sing with symbolic accompaniments.
Finally, relationes secundum dici (speech-alone talk) introduces the possibility of explicit abstraction.
0027 Let me say that again, more slowly, starting with the first period.
0028 The top row concerns archaeological landmarks. The word, “hominid”, is used to designate bipedal apes. The word, “hominin”, designates hominids who belong to the family tree that ends with Homo sapiens.
In adding the term, “hominin”, to their vocabulary, archaeologists commit a funny sort of misdirection. The further back in evolutionary time, the more difficult it gets to tell whether a particular fossil is ancestral.
0029 Nonetheless, evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, identifies a relation that holds for mammals. Larger brain size (more or less) corresponds to larger group size (more or less). For the brain size to body ratio of the australopithecines (the so-called “southern apes” who walked before 3.5Myr), the group size is 50.
0030 In Comments on Clive Gamble, John Barrett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2104) “Thinking Big”, Mah picks up on the anthropologists’ claim that the band (50) is a social circle, and that social circles seem to scale by a factor of three. The idea of social circles places the family (5) and intimates (5) as the smallest social circle. The band (50) is the largest social circle at the start of hominin evolution. Plus, in the distant future, community (150) is the next social circle that will constellate.
0031 Of course, this leaves an unattended, yet theoretically anticipated, social circle of around 15. Notably, most teams in contemporary sports consist in around 15 members. Five may be on the field at any moment. But, those five positions have two back-up players ready to go, at a moments notice. To me, the number 15 associates to teams. Once this association is made, then the obvious social circle to support obligate collabortive foraging is the team.
“Obligate collaborative foraging”?
Michael Tomasello coins the term, as far as I can see.
The term means that individual foraging is less successful than when a team forages together. Team foraging makes sense when the foraging strategy is to figure out food that other predators and herbivores are either unaware of or ignore. Teams opportunistically band and disband, depending on what is available at a particular time and location.
Communication among team-members is required.
0032 So, proto-linguistic hand-talk is an adaptation.
The semiotic types of manual-brachial gestures are icon (images, picturing, pantomiming) and index (pointing, indicating, orienting).
0033 Now, a comparison between Aristotle (belonging to our current Lebenswelt) and a member of early Homo erectus(belonging to the Lebenswelt that we evolved in) may be configured in the following manner.
0034 For Aristotle, an inquirer encounters a thing. Scientists might call it a noumenon. The thing is a subject for implicit abstraction. That implicit abstraction may follow the logics of firstness, secondness and thirdness.
In firstness, the thing is an intuitive whole in the same way that the referent that is pictured or pointed to in hand talk is an intuitive whole. So, for the hominin, a thing may be what can be pictured and pointed to with a manual-brachial gesture.
In secondness, the thing has matter and form. But, hand talk cannot picture or point to these explicit abstractions. Nevertheless, the brain and body adapts to a distinction between esse_ce and essence. This adaptation is the most likely basis for phenotypic propensities to recognize relationes secundum esse (relations according to existence) as both real and relevant. Recognition does not involve explicit abstraction. Recognition is an implicit abstraction.
In thirdness, a thing is an actuality2 that occurs in a normal context3 and arises from a potential1.