Genetic Histories and Patterns of Linguistic Change

The search for the biological foundations of human culture inevitably leads to language. Superficial intuition suggests that language is a sine qua non for the evolution of sociality. Without it, the diversity and so- phistication of today's social systems would be unthinkable. However, there is the opposite hypothesis that the evolution of human language may in part be the result of our being thoroughly social entities: our sociality itself may have amplified the evolution of a capacity we share with other primates but developed to a degree unequaled as yet by any other species. To date, the issues involved have been the subject of intriguing dis- cussions within linguistics, paleoanthropology, and so forth. Most of these discussions have been restricted to the narrow confines of a single discipline and its methodological arsenal. Yet, the presumed inter- dependence of the evolution of language as a biological capacity and its growing significance for human culture calls for an interdisciplinary ef- fort to explore the processes involved both on a phylogenetic and onto- genetic scale.