The Symbolic Mind: Apes, Symbols, and the Evolution of Language

Language presents a specifically problematic but nonetheless central issue for accounts of human evolution. It does not fossilize and there is no agreement on what a precursor would look like. One main issue is the difficulty of studying how symbolic language affects cognition, given that all healthy humans develop language. However, one avenue is ape language research. Cognitive experiments with symbolically competent bonobos, compared with bonobos without competency in human symbolic communic ...