How food fueled language, Part II: language genres, songs in the head, and the coevolution of cooking and language

ABSTRACT This paper examines how cooking and language emerged and coevolved as drivers of human creativity. Through this dynamic coevolutionary process, shifts in diet affected demographics, which increased social and cognitive complexity, leading to new technological and social innovations, and eventually genetic changes. A work of interdisciplinary synthesis, this paper combines work from diverse fields including anthropology, cognitive archaeology, evolutionary syntax, genre studies, neuroscience, and paleoethnobotany. A key contribution from genres studies is that the emergence of language allowed for a proliferation of linguistic genres (referred to collectively as proto-poetry), and that earworms, or songs stuck in the head, are likely cognitive fossils of these first proto-poems that evolved to enhance working memory and recursive thought. The argument proposed here hinges on the beliefs that in order to better understand how language first arose, we need to ask what the first words were about, and that food was likely the subject around which language first gravitated. Language is a cultural tool that emerged from our interactions with our environment, and food is a very important aspect of that environment. This paper is part two of a two-part article.