%0 Journal Article
%T Confrontational scavenging as a possible source for language and cooperation
%A Derek Bickerton
%A E£¿rs Szathm¨¢ry
%J BMC Evolutionary Biology
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2148-11-261
%X Language and cooperation form perhaps the most distinctive features of the human species. That language is unique to humans is almost universally acknowledged, even by those on opposite sides of the nativist/empiricist debate [1,2]. While closest relatives of humans have been shown to have a capacity, under intensive training, for rudimentary forms of language [3], there is no indication that this capacity would ever have developed in the wild. Cooperation on the scale practised by humans is found elsewhere only among the hymenoptera, although there the basis (kin selection) is quite different from that of human cooperation [4]. It would be remarkable enough if any species, in the 4-7 my (million-year) time-span suggested for human evolution, had developed just one of these traits. That each developed independently in the same species, with its own separate evolutionary history, seems unlikely.Could co-operation have led to language, or vice versa? There are problems with either solution. A "language-first" model faces the difficulty that language presupposes a level of trust unlikely to exist given the conniving and deceit found among nonhuman primates [5]. Why would anyone believe verbal utterances, given that words are such "cheap signals" [6], and how, if no-one believed them, could language have taken root? However, a "cooperation-first" model faces an equal difficulty in that most evolutionary studies of human cooperation assume the existence of communal norms and the punishment of infractors [7-9]. It remains unclear how such norms could have been established without any kind of language.The issues are further complicated by the fact that neither the evolution of language nor the evolution of co-operations is as yet well understood. There is still no consensus as to how language originated [10,11], while even recent work on the origins of co-operation. (typically treated as some mix of inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism and group selection with other fact
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/261