Re: Neanderthal and PIE
From: | ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> |
Date: | Monday, October 13, 2008, 14:49 |
Mark Reed wrote:
>As far as the Neanderthal lang, what if you posit that Neanderthals
>transmit language to their children more faithfully than their
>Cro-Magnon successors? Perhaps due to their creative skills lying in
>a different area, the teaching process is more direct and thorough.
>Then P-I-E could have been spoken as Neanderthalese for untold
>centuries, changing much more slowly than modern human langs, before
>being picked up and subjected to relatively rapid generational change
>by H. sapiens.
What if, by some freak of evolutionary development, the Neanderthal language
was transmitted _genetically_? That might mean that it would be difficult
for non-Neanderthals to learn it, thus, early modern humans would have
learnt it imperfectly.............
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