ABSTRACT
Archaeologists tend to agree that the transition to the Upper Paleolithic is one of the most complex, often elusive, research topics in the field. Lithic industries constitute the largest corpus of remains in the archaeological record of the Paleolithic. This chapter reviews the biolinguistic conception of language. It argues that the biolinguistic perspective, with its conception of the Faculty of Language (FL), may help evolutionary anthropology in the quest for our origins—especially those of our unique cognitive capacities. However, material culture remains, especially rare ones, only offer a partial view of the minimum cognitive abilities of whoever made such objects. The chapter offers an example of how biolinguistics may contribute to progress in research and shows how a shift in focus helps us make significant headway. The qualification is in order because it could even be that Neanderthals had achieved one level of complexity without reaching the other.
