Melissa Mashock
                                    Week 1 Sem Paper
                                    Sep 26, 2007

    The authors of The Third Chimpanzee and Early Humans and their World, Jared Diamond and Bo Graslund, have both studied the evolution of humans and the emergence of language upon the historical map. Although they do not share identical views, the two authors mostly agree on many points throughout the reading.
    Jared Diamond and Bo Graslund have some overlapping views on the evolution of human language. What Diamond calls “The Great Leap” is an evolutionary movement forward that he says is propelled by the acquisition of an anatomical ability to speak (54). This view seems to be shared by Graslund. Graslund goes into detail about the research done with various primates, and argues that only the vocal anatomy of the primate was preventing simple speech similar to a human language (124).
    In two notable quotes, Graslund states, “it is also possible that the missing element in the Neanderthals’ intellectual toolkit was not the ability to think analytically, logically, or in the abstract. (111)” Diamond echoes this by writing, “I suspect that we would find Cro-Magnons to be equally modern people, capable of learning to fly a jet plane. (54)” Diamond argues that the reason Cro-Magnon tools were made of primitive material is that these materials were all that had been invented thus far, so there was no need or opportunity to learn more complex things. This does not mean that the species was unable to learn.   
    However, the two authors have their points of dissension as well. Diamond goes against the usual view that human societies and thinking evolved around the activity of hunting big game. Indeed, he claims that only after humans evolved modern anatomy and behavior was big game hunted frequently (40). This would mean that plants and small game made up the primary part of the diet of Middle Stone Age man (46).
    Graslund believes that linguistic development began after early humans split from the apes, but progressed rather slowly. (133) Humans began to produce sounds, which gradually turned into words, then into simple sentences. Graslund writes that it may be because of ranking issues typical of herd animals that early humans began the use of curse words (131). Altogether, he theorizes, early man had a vocabulary of a few hundred simple words (133).
    For the most part, these two authors agree with each other on the basic principles surrounding human evolution of language; because much about the subject is unsure and cannot be proven, they do not make any blatantly clashing statements.