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Notes on video lecture:
The Language of Homo Sapiens
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
limitations, decide, gossip, larger, 1225, vocal, dead, cooperate, meanings, language, sophisticated, meat, norms
something amazing started happening to Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago which had to do with our                 , the way we talk and think, it is our language which has made us the masters of this world
what is so special about Homo sapiens language
Homo sapiens are not the only animals with            communication abilities
other animals can communicate through less                            sounds, or through chemicals in order to communicate information about the location of food, flowers, etc.
animal even use vocal languages, such as green monkeys
not just shouting
scientists discovered that monkeys have words or calls that have particular                 , e.g. a call that means "careful" and when played back, the monkeys would become frightful, more aware and climb up tree
with another call, the monkeys would tend to look up, perhaps indicating some other kind of danger
whales and elephants also have vocal abilities with which they can communicate over many kilometers
parrots can make the same sounds as a human language, so whatever it is that makes humans more intelligent than parrots, it's not only the skills of vocal expression
yet Homo sapien's language is amazingly complex
it's not the number of sounds that are important, but the ability express an unlimited amount of meaning
green monkeys can say "there is a lion nearby" or "there is something flying above that is dangerous"
early Homo sapiens, however, could run back from the river and say, "there is a lion chasing a heard of bison" so that the band of humans could              what to do: perhaps run away or perhaps go wait until the lion kills a bison, then go get the remaining bones and         , or go hunt the bison,
the most important that was communicated was not exterior information such as where lions or bananas were to be found, but information about humans themselves
we tend to think about              as a bad habit, but without gossip, it is very hard to live in a large group to                    effectively with other people
when living in large groups, it is very important to know who hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is cheating on whom, who is honest, who is competent, who is reliable
if you are in a band of early humans, it is very beneficial for you to know who in your band while hunting lions, is likely to come to your assistance and who is likely to run away
if two people in your band start fighting among each other, you have to decide which one of them you are going to help, perhaps the strong one, or the one that has the best connections to others, and the information you have about these people, you know through gossip
the amount of information you need to know to function well in a large group is quite massive: in a band of 50 humans, there are about          one-on-one relationships, plus the more complex relationships between groups of three and four
because of the                        of their language, chimpanzees cannot gossip effectively, and so if they haven't seen it with their own eyes, they do not have important information about other members in their group
the linguistic abilities that developed in Homo sapiens around 70,000 years ago enabled them to begin gossiping about other members in their band for hours on end which gave people reliable information about who they could trust or not trust, which enabled Homo sapiens to live in larger bands as well as reduced the risk of cooperating in more sophisticated ways in              groups
even today, the majority of human information today is gossip, about people you know, leaders, movie stars
gossip usually focuses on wrong-doings, it serves as a kind of police and the court who were breaking the            of what they shouldn't do
50,000 years ago, if nobody wanted to be your friend or cooperate with you, you were as good as         
The Context of History and Our Extended Human Family
How Walking Upright Led to Better Social and Cooperative Skills
The Importance of Fire and Cooking
Why Did Other Human Species Become Extinct?
The Cognitive Revolution and the Beginning of Human History
The Language of Homo Sapiens
How Fictive Language Enabled Larger Social Groups
The Power of Imagined Realities
How the Ability to Tell Stories Enabled Humans to Cooperate in Massive Groups
The Cognitive Revolution and the Variety of Human Communities
Spiritual Beliefs of Early Humans
Politics and Warfare of Pre-Agricultural Societies
45,000 Years Ago: Human's Decimation of Australia's Large Mammals
14,000 BC: Human Migration to the Americas
Agriculture: The Good and the Bad
10,000 BC: Agricultural Revolution
The Origins of Agriculture
The Code of Hammurabi and Other Imagined Realities
Inter-Subjective Reality and Romantic Consumerism
The Human Brain's Outsourcing of Mathematics
Unjust and Imagined Hierarchies
Imagined Hierarchies in History
Culturally Defined Gender
Three Theories of Gender Domination
The Direction of Humankind: Global Unity
The Essence of Money
The History of Money
The Historical Definition of Empire
The Relationship between Science, European Imperialism and Capitalism
Science, Capitalism and European Imperialism
Columbus: Last Man of the Middle Ages, Vespucci: First Man of the Modern Age
European Empires, Science, and Capitalism
How Capitalism is Based on Trust in the Future
On the Interdependence of Science and Capitalism
How Capitalism Enabled Small European Countries to Explore and Conquer the World
The Relationship Between Capitalism, the Slave Trade, and Free Market Forces
Industrialization, Energy and Raw Materials
The Second Agricultural Revolution and its Effect on Animal Treatment
The Ethics of Capitalism and Consumerism
On Limitless Energy Resources and the Hegemony of Modern Time Schedules
State/Market vs. Family/Community
Humankind's Rigid and Violent Past, and Flexible and Peaceful Present
Reasons for Our Current Unprecedented Era of International Peace
Three Theories on the History of Happiness
Psychological and Biological Happiness
Measuring Human Happiness
The Future of Cyborgs and Robots
What Do We Want to Want?