But scale of knowledge acquisition is mediated by, at minimum, lifespan, and what knowledge there is to verbalize and pass on, no? It’s not like we got the language then built our hands based on the knowledge shared by another person with hands.
Instead, these co-evolved. Our language is shaped by that, and we shouldn’t give it too much causal power when it’s only a slice of the system.
We are also very unclear on what birds can communicate. They’re social migratory species with 4 color vision and magnetoreception. Their sensory context is deeper and richer in some ways, and whatever communication they layer atop it will be shaped by that. What seems like squeaks and chirps can hold information that another bird, but not humans, can decode. We’re getting better at layering all this context and then interpreting bird song and sounds.
But we’re at the beginning of this exercise, not a place where we can make a firm conclusion.
Sure, lifespan is a factor, but it's hard to argue that lifespan has been the main factor for humans. Or that lifetime of many other organisms isn't sufficient. And I already pointed out that we co-evolved with language, that's what it means for it to be a dialectical process. However, for language even get bootstrapped, it needs the prerequisite brain structures to support recursive grammars and abstractions we use.
What we can look at is what other species are able to accomplish and how much they are able to shape their environment. I'm not arguing the fact that we don't have a good grasp on how other animal communicate and different kinds of intelligence we have in the animal kingdom. What I'm saying is that our unique combination of being able to abstract concepts and package them up using language, and especially writing, is what allowed up to rapidly accumulate knowledge and pass it across generations. We are demonstrably the only species that does this. Although, there were other hominids originally with similar capabilities that went extinct.
Why is it hard to argue lifespan has been a major factor?
You speak of “prerequisite brain structures to support recursive grammars”… would they arise in short lived species, given we know these are complex brain regions that take time to develop, need experience to become fully useful, and are energetically expensive to maintain and run? How do you do that if you live a relatively short time?
On the flip side, precisely in longer lived species like whales and elephants, your statements begin to fail. Elephants (when left in the wild) do accumulate knowledge of huge stretches of a continent and pass on that knowledge horizontally and also down to their progeny.
Whales and dolphins also show initial signs of such linguistic competence.
What these species don’t have is our opposable thumbs, etc. Things that aren’t directly responsible for language and would have evolved without it (as opposable thumbs have in other species), that nevertheless added to what language can do.
That should give you a sense of how language in humans is only as complex as the humans and their society is.
As for writing, I’m really not clear that it’s better than leaving smell traces, when it comes to information density, and speed of sharing. Where it does better is in surviving across generations, and that is indeed an advantage, that our language can go through a short lived medium (sound) AND a longer lived medium which doesn’t tax our memories as much.
Note that writing is a much later invention though, than language. And very tied to our opposable thumbs which can make fine marks and do so repeatably enough that we could associate repeated sounds with repeatable symbols and generate this writing based transmission system. Take that away and we’d remain an oral culture. We’d have do what Sanskrit users did before they found stable ways to write, and create ways to improve memorization. That too has survived generations. Just takes a lot more of each person learning, compared to writing.
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