Social Sciences · Cultural Studies
A new theory links the origins of spoken language to storytelling around fires, rather than mainly to the practical needs of daily life. It suggests that firelight may have helped move communication from gestures tied to immediate experience toward speech capable of describing distant times, places and imagined social worlds.
Migration can make populations more similar, but its effect on culture depends on how people adopt common behaviors or beliefs. A simulation found that strong conformity can preserve or increase cultural differences, especially when migration is limited.
People can interpret the same general statement in different ways, yet generic language may still pass on broad knowledge. Across three experiments, a model in which such statements have an uncertain threshold best explained participants’ varied interpretations of new generic claims.
A preprint reports measurable patterns for how capabilities emerge and are forgotten during language-model training. The study says emergence depends on several model parts becoming useful together, while forgetting depends on how widely and strongly a capability is stored.
