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. As a social anthropologist, perched precariously on a narrow ledge while buffeted by contrary winds from the humanities and the natural sciences. In the voice, human beings are equipped with a wonderfully expressive and versatile instrument. For the concept of technology recasts the technical skills of the craftsman in terms of an objective system of rational principles, a logos, in just the same way that the idea of language recasts the verbal art of speaking in terms of the rules of grammar. In a technologically literate society, tool-using is assimilated to the operation of artificial systems, much as speaking is assimilated to writing.
