I watched on YouTube, Ken LaCorte argue that the Native Americans were warlike, in his “The elephant in the room” series “What they don’t teach you about Native Americans”. The sociologist Lawrence H Keeley, made the same point more generally in his book “War before Civilization: the myth of the peaceful savage”. Jane Goodall was lauded for having faithfully recorded brutal unprovoked raids by chimpanzees on neighbouring chimp chimps.
I discussed with ChatGPT, the connection between a possible warlike tendency in the chimp-related hominins, the abrupt start of hominin brain growth from the time of Homo africanus, and the prospect that encephalization simply reflected the creation of human language over the last 2.5 million years having been driven by an abrupt change in the controlling environment from weapon-using competition with savanna predators in the savanna food chain, to weapon using competition between hominin groups.
It’s not hard to get that AI to agree with one’s argument, but I was struck that in exploring it, ChatGPT used the example of raiders cunningly planning a raid. In other words, it was the aggressors who were under adaptive pressure to develop language, they had agency. But an analogy with termites calls that into question. If we accept language as a group facility, and look for biological equivalents to human language, then termite pheromones come to my mind, maybe just from reading Eugene Marais’s “The soul of the white ant” as a youth. But with termites, the agency is provided by the aardvark digging into the nest, the workers are activated to fix the damage by chemical “commands” In other words, language as organising response.
Mod ETA: I think this is the video mentioned:
