January 11, 2003
Quote of the day
...if contemporary hunter-gatherers are any guide, our ancestors were not grunting cave men with little more to talk about than which mastadon to avoid. Hunter-gatherers are accomplished toolmakers and superb amateur biologists with detailed knowledge of the life cycles, ecology, and behavior of the plants and animals they depend on. Language would surely have been useful in anything resembling such a lifestyle. It is possible to imagine a superintelligent species whose isolated members cleverly negotiated their environment without communicating with one another, but what a waste! There is a fantastic payoff in trading hard-won knowledge with kin and friends, and language is obviously a major means of doing so.
Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct, p367
