HOUSE OVERSIGHT 026396 I found Noam's hypothesis very compelling in the past. I still think that the idea that language is somehow a cultural or social invention of our species is wrong. But I think that there is a chance (we don't know that, but it seems to most promising hypothesis IMHO) that the difference between humans and apes is not a very intricate special circuit, but genetically simple developmental switches. The bootstrapping of cognition works layer by layer during the first 20 years of our life. Each layer takes between a few months and a few years to train in humans. While a layer is learned, there is not much going on in the higher layers yet, and after the low level learning is finished, it does not change very much. This leads to the characteristic bursts in child development, that have famously been described by Piaget. The first few layers are simple perceptual stuff, the last ones learn social structure and self-in-society. The switching works with something like a genetic clock, very slowly in humans, but much more quickly in other apes, and very fast in small mammals. As a result, human children take nine months before their brains are mature enough to crawl, and more than a year before they can walk. Many African populations are quite a bit faster. In the US, black children outperform white children in motor development, even in very poor and socially disadvantaged households, but they lag behind (and never catch up) in cognitive development even after controlling for family income. Gorillas can crawl after 2 months, and build their own nests after 2.5 years. They leave their mothers at 3-4 years. Human children are pretty much useless during the first 10-12 years, but during each phase, their brains have the opportunity to encounter many times as much training data as a gorilla brain. Humans are literally smarter on every level, and because the abilities of the higher levels depend on those of the lower levels, they can pe