Neanderthals, modern humans and the archaeological evidence for language

There seems to be widespread agreement that the full panoply of 'Upper Paleolithic' culture in Eurasia, with its rich technology, art, ceremonial and symbolic components, must reflect the presence of essentially 'modern' language patterns, broadly similar to those of present-day populations. The argument is developed here that the behavior associated with the earlier Middle Paleolithic/Neanderthal populations could well reflect a much simpler language structure, of the kind that Bickerton and others have described as 'protolanguage.' Arguably the most relvant features in this context are the apparent absence of explicit 'symbolic' behavior in the archaeological records of the Neanderthals; their apparently simpler patterns of strategic and long-range planning behavior; and simpler and less morphologically structured tool inventories, which may reflect more limited linguistic vocabularies and less 'categorical' forms of mental conceptualization. The much more sharply defined cultural and technological traditions which emerged during the Upper Paleolithic may also be highly significant for the development of language. If these contrasts are accepted, we must presumably look for the origins of essentially modern language in the ancestral African populations, from which the modern populations of Homo sapiens apparently emerged. It is argued that some strong indications of this may be discernible in the archaeological records from Africa and southwest Asia between 50,000 and 110,000 years ago. Finally, a critical distinction is drawn between cognitive potential and behavioral expression, which may help to explain some of the apparent 'anomalies' in the archaeological records of human development over the period of the archaic-to -modern human transition.