666 - Numberphile

666 (and sometimes 616) is the notorious Number of the Beast… what’s all that about? And what has roulette got to do with it!?

Baboons and 4-letter Words Point to Origins of Reading

Monkey see, monkey decipher. A group of baboons has learned to discriminate real English words from non-words just by looking at them written down.

The findings suggest that some of the mental processing involved in reading evolved separately from the specialised language centres that are unique to human brains.

“It’s not that baboons can read,” says Michael Platt of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. The baboons’ achievement is only the first step in reading a word. They did not match the written words to sounds, or understand what the words meant.

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Image Info:  Guinea baboons can be trained to tell a real word from a non-word. Do humans read by building on such pattern recognition?

Image Credit: Joel Sartore/NGS/Getty Images

Cross Cultural Glossolalia: Babeling ›

10 Biggest Puzzles of Human Evolution

We are the ape that stood on two feet, lost its fur and crossed the globe – but why? New Scientist explores these and other enduring riddles of our past.

Some say the first words were sung around a camp fire, others believe they were shouted by hunters – they may even have been in sign language
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An overcrowded Africa, a blossoming of innovation and a gene for adventure may all have played a part in the epic migration that began 65,000 years ago
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Legends of human-like creatures, such as Bigfoot and the Yeti, have entranced us for centuries. Perhaps small groups of our cousins survive in remote regions
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Linguistic Diversity IS Language

In his book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything, master translator David Bellos argues that “Babel tells the wrong story. The most likely original use of human speech was to be different, not the same.”

The fact that all our ape cousins — chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans — can acquire signs — is powerful evidence that our hominid ancestors’ first language was gestural and that the vocal version of language was a relatively recent development. My own guess is that vocal language began emerging about 200,000 years ago.

Lost Treasures: Peking Man’s Bones

• 10 February 2012 by Ed Yong
• Magazine issue 2850. Subscribe and save
• For similar stories, visit the Human Evolution Topic Guide

A crate containing some the world’s most important hominin fossils vanished amid war in 1941 – along with secrets about the origins of language.

In September 1941, Hu Chengzhi placed several skulls into two wooden crates. Around him, China was at war with Japan, so he was sending the skulls to the US for safekeeping. They never arrived. Hu was among the last people to see one of the most important palaeontological finds in history.

These lost skulls belonged to Homo erectus pekinensis, known as Peking Man. More than half a century later, evolutionary biologists would still love to get their hands on these fossils: not only would they help answer questions about early cannibalism among our ancestors, they could even shed light on the origins of spoken language.

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World’s Languages Traced Back to Single African Mother Tongue: Scientists

New Zealand researchers have traced every human language — from English to Mandarin — back to an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.

Scientists say they have traced the world’s 6,000 modern languages — from English to Mandarin — back to a single “mother tongue,” an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.

New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures.

The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times.

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What was that about Genesis 11 and the origin of language?  Science has silenced you yet again.

(via parkstepp)

Three members of the family of great apes have a crucial speech-related brain feature previously thought unique to humans.

This is the finding of a pair of researchers in Atlanta, Georgia, US, who carried out magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas.

They say they were surprised no-one had looked for the crucial lopsided structure in great apes before.

The discovery could imply that evolution of brain structures linked to speech began before the ancestors of humans and apes parted ways.

Puzzling discrepancy

Brodmann’s area 44 is part of the Broca’s area in the human brain.

It is critical for speech production and it is larger in the left hemisphere than in the right.

Claudio Cantalupo and William Hopkins of Emory University and Georgia State University were puzzled by the fact that the apes had a similar structure, but obviously could not speak.

“The part possession by great apes of a homologue of Broca’s area is puzzling, particularly considering the discrepancy between sophisticated human speech and the primitive vocalisations of great apes,” they write in the journal Nature.

Right-handed apes

“This may be explained by the contribution that gestures have made to the evolution of human language and speech,” they speculate.

Captive great apes tend to gesture with their right hands, especially when making some kind of vocal noise, they note.

Their theory is that as the ancestors of humans and great apes learned to grunt and gesticulate, the left side of their area 44s grew larger.

However, it appears that for some reason grunting and gesturing went on to become language in humans, but not in the apes.

Chimp Brains May Be Hard-Wired to Evolve Language ›