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'body language'. While these means allow efficiently to communicate about the
“here and now”, they do not support a broadening of the
temporal horizon
(i.e.
communicating about the past, future (Nehaniv 1999)), and events and group
members that are absent. Obviously, there has not been a strong selective ad-
vantage for non-human apes in developing elaborate symbolic representational
systems, although primate politics shows that non-primates do take into con-
sideration the past and the future when deciding on how to behave socially,
e.g. when predicting the behavior of conspecifics. Thus, non-human apes seem
to possess mental representations, but it is unclear whether these representa-
tions are symbolic. Therefore, in terms of mental and communication skills
humans and other apes have a lot in common, they possess mental representa-
tions and communication systems, but only humans possess an elaborate
sym-
bolic/linguistic representational system
that is necessary for communicating via
human language
(cf. (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990) for discussions on communi-
cation systems in vervet monkeys). Interestingly, as Oliphant (Oliphant 1999)
points out, a representational system which can learn word-meaning associa-
tions need not be computationally very expensive. Therefore, the information
processing capacity of the brain can not be responsible for the fact that humans
use language and chimpanzees in the wild do not. However, it is important
to note that the form of human languages as such is meaningless. Words and
sentences become meaningful only as a result of a cognitive effort that
creates
meaning and puts messages in
context
. The ability to construct and give mean-
ing to representations is a 'computationally' expensive process, e.g. it requires
identification and interpretation of the context of the communicative event,
such as the personality/character of the sender (is he trustworthy?), the rela-
tionship between 'sender' and 'recipient' of a message (potential mate? com-
petitor?), important third-party relationships, positions in the group hierarchy
etc. Thus, one and the same 'message' can have potentially many different inter-
pretations and 'meanings', depending on the complexity of the primate social
field (discussed below), the number of different roles an individual can have,
and the potential to create new roles and relationships.
Although humans use gestures, facial expressions, body language and other
non-verbal means to convey (social) meaning, human communication is dom-
inated by verbal communication, which is serial in nature (although in face-
to-face interaction accompanied by non-verbal cues). Thus, given the serial
communication channel of human language, what is the best means to com-
municate social issues, namely learning about the who, what, and why? Physi-
cal social grooming, the main group cohesion mechanism in non-human pri-
mates is 'holistic', parallel, spatial, sensual, meaningful. How can a stream of
