ABSTRACT
There are those who have suggested that hominids became truly human around the time of the Upper Paleolithic. According to this view we arrived, not gradually, but explosively (Binford, 1981). Language came into the picture along with a variety of additional mental capabilities, such as planful action, in a single leap, perhaps 35,000 to 45,000 years ago. The single leap idea has been fostered by the influential role Chomsky (1967) played in emphasizing the enormous gap between human language and the communication systems of any other species. Most current authors, however, are more amenable to the idea that language may have emerged in our species over a period of millions or at least hundreds of thousands of years in a series of stages, each one offering new properties of language that provided some sort of selectional advantage over prior stages (Bickerton, 1990; Pinker, 1994).
