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You are right.
What always confounds me is the inclination of some researchers to place the boundary of language around humans alone, and the battle of other researchers to extend the concepts to other species.
If we had a time machine and could investigate every human ancestor for 20 million years, and any other species we chose, then there would be no natural break point, and the subtle changes in brain and functionality could be studied. We may come up with a different paradigm.
As it is, with extant species, the gulf is obvious, but that very gulf might be blinding us to some subtleties.
Permalink Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:09:18 UTC | #858617