Re: Capacity for literacy


"Lee Olsen" <paleocity@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1150041618.607675.152580@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

JohnRoth1@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
john0714@xxxxxxx wrote:
When do you think, say, within a 10,000 year window, the first Earth
creature was born, who could be taught to read at what is generally
considered a sixth grade level in the USA today had thre been anyone to
teach him? IIRC reading was invented about 5,000 BC but that late a
date
was only because they had to invent the concept of reading from whole
cloth. And primitive illiterate societies discovered around the world
in the last 600 years have had individuals able to learn to read almost
immediately. So I presume the answer would be no later than 35,000 BC,
but how much sooner within a 10,000 year window? Do you think any
neanderthals were capable or any pre-neanderthals?

You've got a number of false presuppositions here. The first
is that Neandertals were ancestral; they weren't, so the
question of whether they could read has no relevance to
when that ability showed up in h.sapiens.


You are making the false supposition that the 'reading neutral
allele' (I made that up) wasn't present before the Neandertal/H.
sapiens split. Since you don't know when the ability to read arrived,
you can't know if it was before the split or not. Thus, the
Neandertal question could be relevant or it might not, but
possibility can't be eliminated until a specific time-line can be
established.

Some of the experiments in chimp language used signs. The chimps learned
what they meant. That would suggest that the ability to learn to read to a
degree was around before the chimp human split.





Since Australian aborigines can learn to read, it's got to be
way older. What the facility was used for before writing was
invented is unknown, or at least I don't know, and I've never
heard any speculation.

John Roth

I don't think the problem (and the test) is all that complicated, nor
would it require a lot of speculation. Using chimps and children as
models (as to what they can accomplish at what age) I would speculate
the ability to read was present 400,000 years ago...plus or minus
100,000 of course.

Lee Olsen



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