It was the emergence of language that played a decisive role in organizing groups according to people’s movement and purposes.
Words enable us to “show” things which are not visible and communicate across distances of space and time. They are a portable and efficient tool for communication.
Archeology professor Steven Mithen hypothesized that the various intelligences that our human ancestors had developed as separate neural modules were linked by language to create cognitive fluidity, which brought about new concepts and technologies.*
■References (Books, papers, Web articles, etc.)
The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science Steven Mithen Thames & Hudson (November 17, 1996)
*A neural module is a bundle of nerves corresponding to the knowledge for solving similar problems. There are modules for natural intelligence, technical intelligence, and social intelligence. Non-human animals also have these intelligences, but as with our human ancestors prior to the acquisition of language, the modules work independently and solve different problems. It was the power of language that changed this state, and linked the separate modules.
The most important function of language is metaphor. For example, if you remove the contents of the stomach, it becomes a bag into which you can put things (the link between natural intelligence and technical intelligence). When it is possible to express a person’s character in a single word—”majestic like a lion,” or a “clever like a fox”—it becomes easier to understand the relationships between people (the link between natural intelligence and social intelligence). [Editorial note]
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