n April 12 in San Francisco, a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 400 people attended the third biennial Wattis Foundation Symposium in Anthropology, sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences and organized by Nina Jablonski. This year's theme (Origin and Diversification of Language) brought eight international speakers together for discourse about the human capacity for communication. Topics ranged from animal communication to the spread of agriculture; participants ranged from linguists to prehistorians to cognitive psychologists.
Peter Marler (UC-Davis) discussed how much we can learn about animal communication without necessarily understanding how it works. Vervet alarm calls, for example, are predatorspecific and playback experiments can ''define'' these sounds in terms of its functional referent. What we do not know, however, is whether the alarm call itself is an appellation (''leopard'') that stimulates a reaction in the receiver, or a prescription for the action (''climb up the tree'') that the receiver reflexively performs. Marler emphasized that although animals build call repertoires as they mature, they lack the capacity for lexical syntax, which underlies human language.
Leslie Aiello (London) took an evolutionary perspective on the precursors of human language. She argued that as our ancestors became more cognitively developed and behaviorally flexible, several factors acted in concert to promote a dynamic medium of communication rather than simply a long list of static vocalizations. These factors included group size and the need for social cohesion in the absence of time for manual grooming. Language, then, could be seen as an outgrowth of social grooming and one of many biobehavioral adaptations of a bipedal primate to a new social and ecological landscape.