Quote:
Originally Posted by ladydoc
Not all language is verbal. Animals communicate by dancing and wiggling like bees.some through pheromones like ants and some by colorful displays like birds and lizards. Apes can be taught to communicate with sign language and they compose independent thoughts and desires. Some language was taught through geometric shapes to birds and mammals. Past is remembered by physical responses like in operatant conditioning. If a dog gets hit for chewing something and then stops doing it he has learned and remembers the punishment
There are many books on this subject. Cavemen are thought to have communicated by gestures before speech developed..
They had the brain capacity for communication. They had to have the capacity to remember the past In order to evolve to the future.
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When bees dance and wiggle to commumicate, does that represent thought or instinct? Ditto for ants, birds and lizards. It's not likely that they think as we do. Apes can be taught to communicate with sign language on a rudimentary level, but the question is the same for them as it is for humans: What was it like for them before they learned it?
Dogs learn from "operant conditioning" but, again, it's very rudimentary? They tend to make associations, in my opinion, and it's not always very effective. When I lived on a dairy farm, my brother taught our dog not to drink milk out of a dairy milk-pail. Many years later, when we no longer had a dairy farm, I tried to give the dog water from a pail and the dog wouln't drink. It didn't have any idea what the original lesson was about.
Perhaps cavemen were, at one time, on the same level as apes and dogs. They would have been very limited in their ability to think and plan ahead. If there were any Einsteins among them, they wouldn't have been able to share their thoughts with the others.