According to this SSC book review, “the secret of our success” is the ability to learn culture + the accumulation of said culture, which seems a bit broader than ability to learn language + language that you describe.
Indeed, I would call complex culture ‘a thing that happens in large and dense enough human populations’ rather than ‘something humans do’. There is a case study in Australia—Australia and Tasmania were separated by water at the end of the last glaciation, and ten thousand years later the population in Tasmania was very very low and they had lost most of the sophisticated tools that the Aboriginal people of Australia had. It’s a percolation problem—with enough people and dense enough interaction networks you get reliable transmission of culture down the generations, and new innovations stick. I would argue that this, not intrinsic differences in cognition, is probably why Neanderthal toolkits stayed simple longer, they were living in the cold wastelands of Europe and Asia and genetics indicates they went through a LOT of low-population bottlenecks compared to our straightforward single bottleneck and expansion.
That’s one of the “unique intellectual superpowers” that I think language confers us:
On a species level, our mastery of language enables intricate insights to accumulate over generations with high fidelity. Our ability to stand on the shoulders of giants is unique among animals, which is why our culture is unrivaled in its richness in sophistication.
(I do think it helps to explicitly name our ability to learn culture as something that sets us apart, and wish I’d made that more front-and-center.)
According to this SSC book review, “the secret of our success” is the ability to learn culture + the accumulation of said culture, which seems a bit broader than ability to learn language + language that you describe.
Indeed, I would call complex culture ‘a thing that happens in large and dense enough human populations’ rather than ‘something humans do’. There is a case study in Australia—Australia and Tasmania were separated by water at the end of the last glaciation, and ten thousand years later the population in Tasmania was very very low and they had lost most of the sophisticated tools that the Aboriginal people of Australia had. It’s a percolation problem—with enough people and dense enough interaction networks you get reliable transmission of culture down the generations, and new innovations stick. I would argue that this, not intrinsic differences in cognition, is probably why Neanderthal toolkits stayed simple longer, they were living in the cold wastelands of Europe and Asia and genetics indicates they went through a LOT of low-population bottlenecks compared to our straightforward single bottleneck and expansion.
That’s one of the “unique intellectual superpowers” that I think language confers us:
(I do think it helps to explicitly name our ability to learn culture as something that sets us apart, and wish I’d made that more front-and-center.)