Bag of Worms Yet Words

89. Do Monkey Vocalizations and Signals Reveal Grammatical Language?

"ScienceNOW.org", Science, vol. 326, 11 December 2009, p. 1467:

An Introduction to Monkey Grammar? 
It's not quite Shakespearean word play, but a species of African monkey can modify individual warning calls to produce novel meanings, according to new research. And because the wild monkeys tack the same sound onto the end of their calls, the authors speculate that they could resemble suffixes. But it's debatable whether the sounds serve a grammatical purpose like that in human language. http://bit.ly/monkeygrammar

Chomsky's assumption, that the semantic central in humans, that generates grammatical linguistic structure, is unique to humans, is an undarwinian conceit. Granting that human language abilities required dramatic genetic mutations, forebrain development, and structural changes in human vocalization anatomy, granting that todays higher primates do not have all of these necessary structures and processes for true human language, and  granting that neither the ancestors of humans or primate had such structures, it nonetheless contradicts the process of evolution, genetic change, and natural selection, that underlay all biology, to think that higher primates and our ancestors possessed none of these capabilities.

There has, on Darwinian principles, to be a continuum between the ancestors of humans and primates and between humans and primates today that diminishes the leap between primate vocalization and human language. The discovery that monkeys have standard atoms of vocalization they can attach to calls to inflect them and that they can assign new meanings to calls on the basis of inflections indicates that the discovery of rudimentary grammatical operations is not far away.

 

88. Monarch Butterfly Navigate With Antennal Clocks

Scientists continue to discover new animal mechanisms for migratory navigation. Birds and insects use perception of the Sun's position in the sky to guide their paths. If they followed the sun exactly, however, the movement of the sun across the sky would misdirect them. They correct their direction by adjusting the sun's position with an internal biochemical clock, the circadian, or daily, rhythm. Recent research shows that in butterflies the navigation mechanism is located in their antannae, not their brains.

The complexity of astronomical navigation in insects and animals, coordinating biochemical clocks in their bodies with the movement of the major astronomical bodies, with major features of the landscape over which they travel, and possibly magnetic compasses based on alignment of iron particles in brain cells, provide an evolutionary platform by which we can understand early human navigational tools.

Early humans obviously utilized second-hand animal-based navigation by following and learning from migrating animals, such as herds of deer; but we should not doubt that humans also utilized an astronomical event calendar that was preconscious long before they could think about it with self-awareness.

The valuated phenomenal world of early humans included stationary landscape features, such as cairns and paths; astronomical time-duration events, such as the diurnal motion of the sun, the monthly phases of the moon, and change of seasons; and cosmic time-duration events, such as the motion of the constellations and planets. These events were coordinated with human perception of time motion, involving at least two separate time calculation brain mechanisms, circadian cycles, and human life course events, such as onset of puberty and women's menstrual cycle. Such complicated time-calculation would have long preceded the building of megalithic astronomical calculators, such as Stonehenge. 

From Science (vol. 325, 25 September 2009, p. 1596), "Butterfly Navigation":

"Monarch butterflies emigrate to Mexico from varioius parts of North America in the fall and navigate with the aid of Sun compass. This navigational mechanism, also employed by migratory birds, uses the circadian clock to compensate for the positional change of the Sun in the sky throughout the day. This mechanism behind time-compensated Sun compass orientation has remained obscure. [Scientsts] now provide comprehensive data showing that the mechanism resides in the antannae of the butterflies, rather than the brain, as previously thought. The 'antennal clocks' found in the monarchs probably provide the primary timing mecnanism for Sun compass orientation. These findings reveal a further function for the antannae--a function that may extend widely to other insects that use this orientation mechanism."

The longer article is Charaloambos P. Kyriacou, "Unraveling Traveling," Science, vol. 325, 25 September 2009, p. 1629 ff.