Liz,
the "sound-niche" you proposed earlier, was this akin to the theories of
Krause? (Krause,B.L.19193)
Peter Lennox
Hardwick House
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----- Original Message -----
From: Liz Watts <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 19 October 1999 10:35
Subject: Response to comments


> Thankyou for your comments about my research.
> I have a few points to make in response.
> I think I am pretty safe in assuming that hominids vocalised before
> they had language. An out of the blue explanantion that hominids went
> from dumb animals to having speech seems fairly dubious to me.
> Primatological work by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and others has shown that
> common chimpanzees and bonobos have a large capacity to learn
> language (especially in the case of Kanzi - whether he actually has
> language or not is immaterial in this case; he obviously has some
> capacity for syntactical communication not associated with basic
> needs). It seems likely that, unless you are going to say all
> inferences from primatology are useless, the "hardware" for language
> existed before it was used. There are also suggestions that language
> evolved out of specialised vocalisations. My research is, however,
> absolutely not concerned with the origins of language. I am concerned
> with what existed before language and not the implications of this
> for language development - I will leave that to others. Leach has a
> point about assumptions, but as long as the grounds for analogy are
> clearly stated and seem justified we should not be scared about using
> it otherwise we'd never get anywhere in thinking about prehistoric
> societies. There is abundant archaeological literature on this
> topic.
>
> Secondly, there was some concern over the use of developmental
> psychology in drawing inferences for early hominids. My point with
> this, as with all the suggestions for obtaining evidence is that all
> the sources will be combined to produce a best fit model. I am not
> basing any reconstruction on one source of data. This aside, I do
> feel the use of humans who do not have language is justified. If the
> "hardware" did exist before we had language (as discussed above) then
> looking at humans who have not yet "learned" language but are still
> trying to communicate may produce vocalisations that are a uselful
> indication of early hominids.
>
> With any type of investigation into prehistory we are always going to
> be beset by problems of best guesses and hermeneutics, but at some
> point we have to stick our necks out. By combining several sources of
> data and acknowledging their biases I would hope to arrive at some
> kind of conclusion, but prehistory is not a pure science and I'm not
> going to pretend about that.
>
> Another comment was about the niche idea. I do hope to find,
> somehow, a sound niche, not an information niche. My idea for doing
> this was to use FFTs of several calls from each animal so I'm not
> relying on purely frequency (although, if frequency alone is my man
> then I'll be quite happy since it would probably save me a lot of
> effort!). The idea is to somehow fingerprint vocalisations so that I
> can see if they come in discrete data groups. Any suggestions? I am
> quite prepared to be pulled to shreds on this as I'm not an expert by
> any means, just an eager novice. This is, also, the part of the
> research I hope to do for my dissertation so any comments are helpful.
>
> I hope this fuels the fire of discussion. Thanks for taking the time
> to read this and for all your comments thus far,
> Liz
>



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