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Rachel Mann
It is clear to me that both Diamond and Graslund hold some very interesting parallels. They both seem to testify to a level of high cognizance in the primates that human beings are evolved from. Graslund proves the advanced nature of chimpanzee social relationships by stating that. “…every chimpanzee settlement differs in some way from all the others” (119). In describing a more highly evolved version of ourselves, the Neanderthals, Diamond illustrates a budding social culture where they took care of their sick and injured, buried their dead and produced fire on a regular basis (44).
Where the two authors begin to diverge from one another is at the topic of the initial acquisition of language. Graslund argues that it was the movement toward bipedalism that brought our distant ancestors over the intellectual language hump. “The anatomical changes from a quadruped to a biped gait certainly brought with them problems of adaptation, for which intelligence clearly would have had a positive selective value” (118). Diamond admits defeat in his speculation of how primates evolved into the language mastered humans we are today. “Unfortunately, the origins of language prove harder to trace than the origins of the human pelvis, skull, tools, and art. All those latter things may survive, and can be recovered and dated, but the spoken word vanishes in an instant” (142).
In the end I believe no one truly knows the complete truth to the answer of how the modern human evolved into fluent speakers, readers, writers and frequent abusers of the evolutionary gift of language. Our social nature may have sparked the need to communicate to the masses or it indeed could have been our merge into upright bipedalism. The fact that both arguments exist leads me to believe that there may still be more options out there.
