Homo Naledi Meets Silvia Ferrara

TWO VIDEOS FOR THOSE WHO LIKE CONTROVERSY

The following two videos could be two lectures delivered to students who are looking for some light on the phylogeny of language, not the origin because such a question has no sense, but the long phylogenetic process that enabled Homo Sapiens along with anterior Hominins to inherit whatever calls composed with consonantal and vocalic sounds articulated together into clusters that were communicational messages to other members of the animal communities, into a fully articulated language with a lexicon, a morphology, a syntax, and a semantic architecture, along with all sorts of other means to produce direct communication, and at times this oral production was marked with rhythm, sound effects, “figures of speech,” and other elements that we would consider today poetic, hence artistic.

The main idea along this line is that at every step of this long phylogenetic process, the state reached by articulated language is a development of the previous step, hence a post-gression and the same step is also the potential of what is going to come next, hence a pro-gression. Alphabetical writing is the pro-gression after the simple engravings of holistic symbolical forms or patterns inscribed in caves by Homo Naledi in 300,000 BCE, or the very similar inscriptions that Homo Neanderthals left behind in some…