[...]... morphological theory and word formation, and the evolution of language He is the author of twelve books, including Unravelling the Evolution of Language (2003) He was the organizer of the Cradle of Language Conference held in November 2006 in Stellenbosch, South Africa Rebecca L Cann has been a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for the last 21 years She received her BS in... letter of the genetic code) subject–verb–object The World Atlas of Language Structures edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew Dryer, David Gil, and Bernard Comrie (OUP 2005) Notes on the contributors Alan Barnard is Professor of the Anthropology of Southern Africa at the University of Edinburgh His ethnographic research includes long-term Weldwork with the Naro (Nharo) of Botswana and comparative studies of. .. the use of linguistic evidence to reconstruct aspects of prehistory), linguistic Weldwork, and languages of the Caucasus Publications include Aspect (1976), Language Universals and Linguistic Typology (1981, 1989), The Languages of the Soviet Union (1981), Tense (1985), and The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century (with Gerald Stone and Maria Polinsky, 1996) He is editor of The World’s Major Languages... Corbett) of The Slavonic Languages (1993) and (with Martin Haspelmath, Matthew Dryer, and David Gil) of The World Atlas of Language Structures (2005) He is also managing editor of the journal Studies in Language Michael Cysouw is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig His interests include the typology of pronoun systems and of content interrogatives, the. .. Archeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands His research focuses on the Upper Paleolithic of central Europe and on the behavioral ecology of European Neanderthals Ian Watts gained his PhD at the University of London for a thesis on the African archeology of pigment use and the cosmology of African huntergatherers His publications include several papers on the southern African Middle Stone Age ochre... that the inhabitants of Blombos Cave must have been attentive to how others saw and understood them Taking this argument a stage further, the use of cosmetics and ornaments surely ‘‘suggests that one person can understand how she looks from the point of view of another person.’’ The ability to see Introduction 5 oneself from the standpoint of others—‘‘to represent how an object appears to another person’’—is... Fossils, therefore, can tell us little about the timing of the evolution of speech as a transmission mechanism for language Chapter 7 turns to the genetic capacity for language and the light shed by genes on language evolution We now know (Krause et al 2007) that 8 Knight the Neanderthals shared with modern humans the mutations in the FOXP2 gene claimed by some to have triggered the emergence of language. .. as ‘‘languages,’’ ‘ the human genome,’’ and ‘ the human language capacity’’ are not unitary phenomena open to scientiWc study They are abstractions of our own making If science is to proceed, we must unpack them so that the complexities they hide are exposed In real life, there can have been no ‘‘First Human,’’ no single ‘ Cradle of Language, ’’ no ‘‘Mother Tongue,’’ and no moment at which ‘ the Language. .. application of new techniques of analysis to the study of Paleolithic art objects He has published more than 150 papers on these topics, mostly in international journals, and currently leads a multidisciplinary research project in the framework of the Origin of Man, Language and Languages program of the European Science Foundation Karl Diller is researching the genetic and evolutionary origins of humans... favor of this color Watts (Chapter 4) forces these rival models into conXict with one another, testing between their divergent predictions The most sophisticated version of the innatist paradigm is the theory of Basic Color Terms (BCT) in its various incarnations since Wrst publication in the late 1960s (Berlin and Kay 1969) Watts shows how—in the face of recalcitrant empirical data—this body of theory . formation, and the evolution of language. He is the author of twelve books, including Unravelling the Evolution of Language (2003). He was the organizer of the Cradle of Language Conference held in November. more generally with the origins and evolution of language appear in The Pre- history of Language. The present volume focuses more speciWcally on the origins of language in Africa. Both reXect the authors’. alt="" The Cradle of Language Studies in the Evolution of Language General Editors Kathleen R. Gibson, University of Texas at Houston, and James R. Hurford, University of Edinburgh Published 1 The