Language Neuromechanics: The Human Biological-Language Evolution

The paper proposes that the understanding of human language evolution requires the comprehensive understanding of language in terms of language types, formations, and learnings and the comprehensive understanding of human biological evolution in terms of the emergences of various hominin species with various language capacities. This paper proposes language neuromechanics and the human biological-language evolution. Language is derived from bodily movement. Language neuro-mechanics combines neuroscience to study language brain and biomechanics to study language movement. Language neuromechanics consists of language type, language formation, and language learning. Language types for advanced animals include gestural language verse vocal language, instinctive language verse controllable language, and symbolic language verse iconic language. Language formation involves the developments of the different types of languages from different bodily movements phylogenetically and ontogenetically. Language learning involves the learning of controllable language to adapt to communicative environment through language brain regions and language genes. This paper proposes a gradual and step-by-step human language evolution from the language of great apes to the human language through the human biological evolution which chronologically and geographically consists of early hominins, early Homos, middle Homos, and late Homos with different language capacities. For hominins, vocal language and gestural language were evolved together. In conclusion, combining neuroscience and bio-mechanics, language neuromechanics provides the comprehensive understanding of language. The combination of language neuromechanics and the human biological-language evolution provides the clear evolutionary path from great apes’ articulate gestural language without articulate speech to human articulate gestural language and articulate speech.

Earliest parietal art:hominin hand and foot traces from the middle Pleistocene of Tibet

At Quesang on the Tibetan Plateau we report a series of hand and foot impressions that appear to have been intentionally placed on the surface of a unit of soft travertine.The travertine was deposited by water from a hot spring which is now inactive and as the travertine lithified it preserved the traces.On the basis of the sizes of the hand and foot traces,we suggest that two track-makers were involved and were likely children.We interpret this event as a deliberate artistic act that created a work of parietal art.The travertine unit on which the traces were imprinted dates to between~169 and 226 ka BP.This would make the site the earliest currently known example of parietal art in the world and would also provide the earliest evidence discovered to date for hominins on the High Tibetan Plateau(above 4000 m a.s.l.).This remarkable discovery adds to the body of research that identifies children as some of the earliest artists within the genus Homo.

Longgudong,an Early Pleistocene site in Jianshi,South China,with stratigraphic association of human teeth and lithics

In this paper we report on Longgudong,an Early Pleistocene cave site in south China which was systematically excavated in 1999 and 2000,and where human teeth and associated stone artifacts were discovered within the same stratigraphic layer.The age of this site was estimated from faunal comparisons and palaeomagnetism and has been attributed to the Early Pleistocene,most probably the earlier Early Pleistocene.The human teeth from this site have been well studied.However,the stone artifacts are still unknown to most scholars.This paper thus presents an analysis of the lithics as the first firmly demonstrated stone tools associated with Early Pleistocene human fossils in south China.

Evidence of Middle Pleistocene hominin migration in the Qinling Mountains(central China)from the Miaokou Paleolithic site

The Qinling Mountain Range(QMR)spans a large region in China and is an important area of hominin activities.Many Paleolithic sites are found in Bahe,South Luohe,and Hanjiang river valleys in the northern,eastern,and southern part of the range,respectively.The Danjiang River valley acts as a channel connecting these valleys and stretches from the north to the south of the QMR.The previous dating of the Paleolithic sites in the Danjiang valley mainly relied on geomorphologic comparison,stratigraphic correlation,fossil characteristics,and Paleolithic artifacts,indicating a lack of absolute data.In this study,we conducted a detailed geochronological investigation of the entire valley,and selected an ideal site—the Miaokou profile.Based on the identification of the loess-paleosol sequences,optically stimulated luminescence,and magnetostratigraphy,the Paleolithic artifacts of the Miaokou site located within the S5 and S6 layers of the profile belong to~0.6-0.7 Ma.This suggests that the Paleolithic site is an old site in the Danjiang River valley,and this period also witnessed a rapid increase in the number of hominin sites during the Middle Pleistocene.Combining our results with previous reports across the QMR,we propose that the Danjiang River valley might have been a corridor for hominin migration,and is worthy of further investigation.