Re: Indo-European question

> The term "Hominid" includes pretty much everything from Lucy and forwards.
> Since, as you say, modern humans have always had about the same language
> skills as we, and it is inconceiveable that something so mind-numbingly
> complex as human language evolved overnight, language must (leaving
> creationism aside) have arisen among some ancestor species. The strongest
> candidate is probably Homo Ergaster (or some similar erectid), but some
> researchers believe it occured as late as among the archaic Homo Sapiens.
>
Something in me wants to argue with this point of view - given the
speed with which complex systems can organise themselves, and the
power of simple pattern matching algorithms to allow complex systems
to develop (and pattern matching being one of the primary functions of
the brain), I would have thought that a complex language could have
developed within a few generations in a community of hominids. And
that this could have happened not just once, but many times.

Or am I talking out of my back end again?

>                                                        Andreas
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Rik, knee deep.

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