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#567 Chris Knight: The Cultural and Social Bases of Language

The Dissenter

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Introduction

Dr Knight is honorary professor in the department of anthropology at university college london. Over many years he has been exploring the idea that human language and culture emerged in our species, not purely through gradual darwinian evolution. He says we can have a theory of the origins of human symbolic culture which would include the emergence of a ritual as well as formal kinship systems. But if you don't inhabit a virtual world like humans do, then language will be impossible to communicate with other animals.

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