Was there language outside Homo sapiens? A cognitive perspective.

The paper of Benítez-Burraco & Barceló-Coblijn (this volume) presented an explicit argumentative line and a number of implicit presuppositions that are the background to that argument. The explicit issue concerns what is to be learned from the discovery of FOXP2 in Neanderthals; the implicit issue regards what we mean by " language " when it is argued that language is one of the basic features of anatomically modern humans. In this commentary, we argue that the two authors' considerations on the explicit issue are convincing and justified, whereas we assert some reservations on the implicit assumptions of their proposal. Our idea is that, regardless of FOXP2, the question of whether language is a unique capability of Homo sapiens is more open than what Benítez-Burraco & Barceló-Coblijn were willing to recognize. The two authors approached the explicit question with great caution regarding the evidence of FOXP2 in hominins other than Homo sapiens. We agree that the presence of FOXP2 in Neanderthals is not convincing proof that they had a language similar to ours. That said, the question whether it is possible to assign language to Neanderthals or to most archaic hominins remains open regardless of the presence of the language gene par excellence. FOXP2, indeed, can be considered the linguistic genotype only by assuming a precise theoretical model about the nature of human language. If one changes the interpretative model, the importance to be assigned to FOXP2 changes dramatically even in the case of Homo sapiens; not surprisingly, as we shall see, the importance of FOXP2 is asserted predominantly by the heirs of the Chomskyan tradition. From these considerations emerges the point that the explicit issue posed by Benítez-Burraco & Barceló-Coblijn is strongly tied to the implicit one: the question of whether or not Neanderthals had language presupposes that the terms of comparison are clear. What exactly, then, did the authors mean by " language " ? Although Benítez-Burraco & Barceló-Coblijn's references to language were very generic (in the text, they just used expressions such as " all human languages appear to share some basic structural properties " or " all human beings are endowed with the same capacity for language "), the two authors actually seemed to have in mind a specific theoretical model. This model is evident in the conclusion of their article when they argued that " languages " that other hominins " plausibly spoke would have lacked …