ABSTRACT
The emergence of a cultural and symbolic way of life during hominid prehistory is intimately related to the emergence of language from non-linguistic precursors. Psychologists and linguists have yet to agree on precisely how children acquire language and their competence with symbols. Imitation and symbolic play, seem to contribute to language learning in another fashion. In both aspects of the phylogenetic emergence of language—its origins and its subsequent evolution—mothers and youngsters play more significant roles than theories of language evolution have accorded them. During ontogeny, developmental programs which regulate gene expression may be strongly influenced by events outside the genome. Part of the "task" of these regulatory developmental systems is to prevent new genetic variability from being expressed in some possibly deleterious way. Elizabeth Bates' longitudinal data make for rich though tentative comparisons regarding the presence or absence, and timing of appearance of key elements in the ontogeny of symbol-using in chimpanzees.
