Social origins: sharing, exchange, kinship

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers three social aspects of the emergence of language: sharing, exchange, and kinship. I shall argue that the earliest full language coincided with the development of other forms of communication, including human kinship—with sharing practices and rules, marital alliance, kin classification, and ultimately kin category extension to the limits of social systems. Virtually all human hunter-gatherer societies retain completely universal systems of kin category extension (where in relation to any given individual, everyone is classified as some kind of “kin”), and the classification of kin among contemporary hunter-gatherers can provide clues to early human social structures. In both language and society, dispositions became rules. Social systems, like languages, evolved into extremely complex yet enabling structures.