bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/166520; this version posted March 15, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Development of behavioral modernity by hominins around 70,000 years ago was associated with simultaneous acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called prefrontal synthesis, and conversion of a preexisting rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to a fully recursive syntactic language Andrey Vyshedskiy1,2* 1Boston University, Boston, USA; 2ImagiRation LLC, Boston, MA, USA *Corresponding author: Andrey Vyshedskiy, Ph.D., Boston University, Boston, USA, Tel: +1 (617) 433-7724; E-mail:
[email protected] Keywords: Language evolution, hominin evolution, human evolution, recursive language, flexible syntax, human language, syntactic language, modern language, Cognitive revolution, Great Leap Forward, Upper Paleolithic Revolution, Neanderthal language, neurolinguistics Abstract There is an overwhelming archeological and genetic evidence that modern speech apparatus was acquired by hominins by 600,000 years ago 1. On the other hand, artifacts signifying modern imagination, such as (1) composite figurative arts, (2) bone needles with an eye, (3) construction of dwellings, and (4) elaborate burials arose only after 70,000 years ago. It remains unclear (1) why there was a long gap between acquisition of modern speech apparatus and modern imagination, (2) what triggered the acquisition of modern imagination 70,000 years ago, and (3) what role language might have played in this process. Our research into evolutionary origin of modern imagination has been driven by the observation of strict dependency between childhood use of full recursive syntactic language and imagination.