V.S. Ramachandran (UC San Diego) argues that human mental uniqueness emerged from the fortuitous co-emergence of certain novel anatomical structures and functions and equally fortuitous synergistic interactions between them. These include structures involved in inter-sensory abstraction (IPL and its uniquely human subdivisions; supra-marginal gyrus and angular gyrus; certain frontal structures, Wernicke’s area, etc.) and sensorimotor abstraction (mirror neurons). He contends that these were then...
May 11, 2015•23 min
A key feature of human social interactions is the ability to make inferences about other individuals’ mental states (e.g. others’ knowledge, beliefs and desires). Juliane Kaminski (Univ of Portsmouth, UK) reviews studies which investigate whether the cognitive capacities underlying these skills are uniquely human or shared, at least to some degree, with other species. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 26077]
May 04, 2015•17 min
This CARTA symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence. One source, which is discussed in these three talks, concerns neuroscientific investigations of functional specialization for language in the human brain and its dependence on the linguistic input the language learner gets during cognitive development. Evelina Fedorenko (Massachusetts General Hospital) begins with an examination of Specializati...
Apr 27, 2015•59 min
Roger Levy, Co-Chair of this CARTA symposium on the evolution of Language, introduces the speakers and topics for this symposium which addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Show ID: 29407]
Apr 24, 2015•8 min
This CARTA symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence. In this program, the speakers field questions from the audience and the seminar is concluded. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 29406]
Apr 24, 2015•41 min
Edward Chang of UC San Francisco is interested in determining the basic mechanisms that underlie our ability to perceive and produce speech. While much of this processing has been localized to the peri-sylvian cortex, including Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, the fundamental organizational principles of the neural circuits within these areas are completely unknown. To address this, his laboratory applies a variety of experimental approaches to examine both local circuitry and global network dynami...
Apr 24, 2015•20 min
Using data from brain imaging investigations and studies of patients with brain damage, Massachusetts General Hospital’s Evelina Fedorenko argues that a set of brain regions in the adult human brain – in the frontal and temporal lobes of the left hemisphere -- are specialized for high-level language processing. She further argues that this fronto-temporal network develops as we acquire language knowledge. In the adult brain, this system stores our linguistic knowledge representations and uses th...
Apr 24, 2015•20 min
Pascal Gagneux, associate director of CARTA, introduces this symposium which addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 29396]
Apr 24, 2015•6 min
This CARTA symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence. One source, which is discussed in these three talks, concerns what contrasts between new and mature languages reveal about how language evolves. Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook Univ) begins with an examination of the Co-emergence of Meaning and Structure in a New Language, followed by David Perlmutter (UC San Diego) on Combinatoriality within the Wor...
Apr 20, 2015•58 min
Mark Aronoff focuses on the emergence of words and lexical categories in new sign languages in this talk. Using naming experiments with groups of non-signing gesturers and signers of new languages, his research team has shown how all groups consistently distinguish between names and actions. They have also shown that emerging lexical distinctions are both cognitive and communicative in nature. They constitute common categories found in languages because they reflect the shared ways that humans i...
Apr 17, 2015•20 min
Matt Cartmill (Boston University) explains the connection between human body fat and bipedality. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 23671]
Apr 14, 2015•16 min
This CARTA symposium addresses the question of how human language came to have the kind of structure it has today, focusing on three sources of evidence. One source, which is discussed in these three talks, has to do with the ways languages get new structure not present in the language of the previous generation(s) of speakers or signers. Simon Kirby (Univ of Edinburgh) begins with an examination of Language Evolution in the Lab: The Emergence of Design Features, followed by Carmel O’Shannessy (...
Apr 13, 2015•57 min
In this talk Ray Jackendoff explores forms of language with very limited organization. Such languages largely lack the familiar manifestations of syntactic structure, but they still manage to map between sound and meaning. Examples include early stages of child language, stages in acquisition of second languages by adults, pidgins, “home sign” (the sign systems invented by deaf children with no sign language input), and “village signs” spoken in isolated communities with hereditary deafness. He ...
Apr 09, 2015•20 min
In this talk Ann Senghas traces the development of basic sentence structure and vocabulary in Nicaraguan Sign Language, in order to uncover the effect of language acquisition processes on language emergence and convergence across age cohorts. Evolutionary principles must apply not only to the development of humans as language learners, but also to the development of languages as systems that change and adapt over generations. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropo...
Apr 03, 2015•19 min
Contact languages represent some of the ways that new languages can be created, as they systematically combine elements from more than one existing language, resulting in novel linguistic systems. When multiple sources provide input to a rapidly emerging new system, elements are likely to be reanalyzed, and new structural categories may be created that differ from those in the source languages. In this talk Carmel O’Shannessy gives examples of restructuring in contact languages, including Light ...
Apr 03, 2015•19 min
By realizing that cultural as well as biological evolution has a central role to play in the origins of language, Simon Kirby and his team have unlocked a method that allows them to observe the evolutionary emergence of language structure in miniature cultures that they have created in the lab. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 29397]
Apr 03, 2015•21 min
Conjugal families are often assumed to be building blocks of human societies and the primary site of childrearing in traditional communities. Alternatively, Kristen Hawkes (Univ of Utah) contends that the Grandmother Hypothesis draws attention to other relationships likely fundamental in the evolution of our lineage. Persistent ties that crosscut conjugal families are implied by our cooperative childcare, distinctive prosociality, and extraordinary operational sex ratios. These high operational ...
Apr 02, 2015•20 min
James Noonan, Assistant Professor of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine, focuses on identifying changes in gene regulation during early embryonic development that contributed to the evolution of uniquely human biological traits. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 21988]
Apr 02, 2015•21 min
Apart from references to the oldest fossil hominins attributed to Homo sapiens, the East African record is often ignored in current scenarios of modern human origins in favor of the much more detailed, well-preserved and better-explored region at the southern end of the continent. Alison S. Brooks (George Washington Univ/Smithsonian Institution) opines that over 20 years of research in the eastern and south-central African zones of woodlands and savannas surrounding the central African rainfores...
Mar 31, 2015•23 min
In this presentation, Matthew Tocheri (Smithsonian Institution) shows how the morphology of four foot bones – the medial cuneiform, talus, calcaneus, and cuboid – is clearly distinguishable among living gorilla taxa in ways that are relevant to interpreting bipedal evolution in hominins. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 23665]
Mar 23, 2015•18 min
When many people want to discover the core of human nature, they turn to those people who allegedly are or represent humanity’s original condition, hunter-gatherers. Do hunter-gatherers have a special ability to reveal human nature? Robert Kelly (Univ of Wyoming) examines this question by focusing on the issue of violence. Do hunter-gatherers say that we are inherently predisposed to violence, or to peaceful cooperation? Trying to answer this question raises a more general one: Is there such a t...
Mar 16, 2015•20 min
Kazuo Okanoya (Univ of Tokyo) describes his research with Bengalese finches, a domesticated strain of wild white-rumped munias that were imported from China to Japan 250 years ago. He shows that evolution of song complexity involves not only factors related to sexual selection and species identification, but also to socio-emotional factors due to domestication. He then speculates that language evolution in humans might also be based on sexual selection and self-domestication. Series: "CARTA - Ce...
Mar 02, 2015•17 min
UC San Diego’s Robert Kluender provides an excellent introductory overview of this symposium which addresses the study of animal domestication, our relationships with domesticated species, and what that might tell us about our own evolution as a species in the more distant past. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 28894]
Feb 19, 2015•17 min
CARTA: Behaviorally Modern Humans: The Origin of Us – Richard “Ed” Green: Interbreeding with Archaic Humans outside Africa. Neanderthals and Denisovans are the closest extinct ancestors of modern humans. High-quality genome sequence data is now available from both and has revealed multiple instances of admixture between these archaic hominins and the ancestors of currently living humans. Ed Green (UC Santa Cruz) discusses how he is using these data to refine the demographic models describing rec...
Feb 18, 2015•24 min
Research on infancy and childhood among !Kung (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers of northwestern Botswana, the first hunting-gathering group where childhood was quantitatively studied, yielded a distinctive characterization of their patterns of child care and behavioral development, and surveys of prior ethnographic literature suggested that core features of these patterns were seen in other hunter-gatherers. In this lecture, Melvin Konner (Emory Univ) contextualizes these findings in the light of recen...
Feb 09, 2015•23 min
Donald Pfaff (Rockefeller Univ) addresses two questions in this talk: First, how is it possible to increase testosterone-fueled aggressive behaviors? Second, what does testosterone do, exactly, in the nerve cell? Understanding all of the ways that testosterone fuels aggression may suggest antidotes: pharmacological, psychological and/or cultural. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 28349]
Feb 02, 2015•16 min
Human beings are animal-machines with added souls. This was famously Descartes’ view, and it’s the view of a good many people today. Nicholas Humphrey (Darwin College) is one of them. He contends that humans have evolved a kind of consciousness that, when egged on by culture, leads them to have an extraordinary view of their own metaphysical importance. In fact, Humphrey believes that it is arguably the main driver of human evolution in the last hundred thousand years. Series: "CARTA - Center fo...
Jan 26, 2015•15 min
The neural crest is a transitory embryonic tissue that, early in development, gives rise to a very diverse set of tissues and organs including pigment cells (melanocytes), bones, muscles and connective tissues in the head, and the adrenal gland. Tecumseh Fitch (Univ of Vienna) hypothesizes that the selection for tameness during early stages of domestication led to delayed maturation and reduced output of the adrenal component of the “fight or flight” response, via reduced neural crest input. Thi...
Jan 05, 2015•20 min
In this talk Terrence Deacon (UC Berkeley) describes how the signature pattern of specific brain structure changes can provide evidence to distinguish between the processes associated with domestication. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 28898]
Dec 15, 2014•21 min
Closing remarks and Q&A for the symposium “Domestication and Human Evolution.” Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 28903]
Dec 12, 2014•56 min
