ABSTRACT
In recent years, neo-Darwinian biology, cognitive science and psycholinguists have conspired to produce an extremely powerful approach to understanding the relations, in human evolution, between technology, language and intelligence. It is argued that linguistic and intellectual capacities, common to all human beings, are built-in properties of a mind whose basic architecture has evolved through a process of variation under natural selection. Remaining issues for debate concern whether the selective pressures guiding the evolution of these capacities lay in the social domain of the relations among conspecifics or in the technical domain of adaptation to the non-human environment, and whether – or at what point in either ontogeny or phylogeny – technical capacities are dissociated from linguistic ones. What is the difference, it is asked, between the kinds of mental constructional tasks involved in toolmaking and tool-using, on the one hand, and speaking, on the other? To what extent does the performance of these tasks call upon similar or even identical neurophysiological mechanisms?
