ANT102H5 Lecture Notes - Hominidae, Noam Chomsky
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ANT102H5 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
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Document Summary
The hominidae (great apes: chimpanzees, gorillas, humans, orangutans. Chimps are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas. Chimps and bonobos are our closest relatives. For many years scientists have attempted to understand what makes humans distinctive from other apes. No other ape has language but many scientists have tried to show that chimps, bonobos and gorillas are capable of learning human languages. After all these attempts, the evidence was inconclusive. Chimps and other great apes could, with significant training, produce combinations of signs. Chomsky defines language as the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements .
