By Juan Uriagereka
Starting out from some well-known formal characteristics of grammars (the Chomsky Hierarchy) we revisit the question of whether the fossil record can provide us with reliable early evidence for fully syntactic linguistic behaviors. We show how the tying of knots requires context-sensitive thinking, in the technical sense, and argue that the null hypothesis is to consider knot-tying as indirect evidence for fully modern syntactic behaviors. We build two major cases for the reconstruction of behaviors crucially involving knots: a) Small projectile technology and b) elaborate pendant ornaments. Since the artifactual evidence of these behaviors can be reliably dated to a period going back perhaps even 110,000 thousand years, it supports the hypothesis that the earliest Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa had already evolved syntactic capacities of the sort we presently witness.