ABSTRACT
A deep archaeology of cognition and behavior has to extend to species that, following the last common ancestor of apes and man, preceded not just Homo sapiens and its immediate ancestors, but a wide array of nonhuman species writ large. This involves formulating components of adaptive behavior among what this chapter designates as “evolutionary creatures” from a mentalistic standpoint. This chapter reviews and discusses relevant theoretical questions involving an understanding of cross-species behavior from a linguistic, cognitivist, and semantical point of view. The chapter then expands and reformulates the theory and method of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), which was designed to compare meanings of concepts among human language speakers. This reconfigured NSM highlights how such an analysis could encompass formulations of evolutionary creatures’ adaptively “rational” behavior in meeting evolutionary imperatives well before the advent of language and cognition as we understand it.
