ABSTRACT
That humans are unique is fairly self-evident. In what this uniqueness fundamentally consists is, by contrast, notoriously difficult to specify. Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man, effectively refuted many of the traditional candidates for the role: ‘moral sense’, curiosity, imagination, belief in God, intelligence, and the like. Psychologists have recognized numerous types of learning, ranging from the genetically based ‘imprinting’ of many animal species, occuring in the early stages of life to enable the animal to identify its parent, to imitation and ‘insight’. Early theorists on the origin of language sought the answer in a number of relatively simple processes such as imitation of animal sounds or noises made by struck objects, expressive exclamations, and vocal play. The hominid body, via evolutionary processes still not completely unravelled, acquired a number of features which jointly amounted to rendering it a ‘universal tool’ for behavioural modelling.
