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Continuity and Discontinuity in Human Language Evolution: Putting an Old-fashioned Debate in its Historical Perspective

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Abstract

The article reconstructs the main lines of three hypotheses in the current literature concerning the evolutionary pace which characterized the natural history of human language: the “continuist” and gradualist perspective, the “discontinuist” and evolution-free perspective, and the “punctuationist” view. This current debate appears to have a long history, which starts at least from Darwin’s time. The article highlights the similarities between the old and the modern debates in terms of history of ideas, and it shows the current limits of each of these perspectives. In the final part, we present an alternative approach which considers human language not as a single trait, but as the result of a mosaic of different elements, some of which recently evolved, and some others gradually evolved and phylogenetically ancient. When matched with a tree thinking and comparative perspective, this view suggests that expressions of symbolic and linguistic behaviors in other human species could have preceded the more complex and systematic behaviors showed by Homo sapiens.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the organizers of the ProtoLang4 Conference for creating such an inspiring meeting. This paper is one of the outcomes of the International research program entitled “The Hierarchy Group: Approaching Complex Systems in Evolutionary Biology” (www.hierarchygroup.com), directed by Niles Eldredge and Telmo Pievani, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Research Unit in Philosophy of Biology - Department of Biology, Università degli Studi di Padova, Via U. Bassi n. 58/B, 35131, Padua, Italy

      Andrea Parravicini & Telmo Pievani

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    1. Andrea Parravicini
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    2. Telmo Pievani
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    Correspondence to Andrea Parravicini.

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    Andrea Parravicini and Telmo Pievani have contributed equally to the research and the realization of this paper.

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    Parravicini, A., Pievani, T. Continuity and Discontinuity in Human Language Evolution: Putting an Old-fashioned Debate in its Historical Perspective. Topoi 37, 279–287 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9431-y

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