Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The object desired by all members of the group—say, the carcass of a large animal brought down by a hunting party—becomes the center of a circle surrounded by peripheral individuals who act as the mediators of each other’s desire. The originary sign provides the solution to or, more precisely, the deferral of a “mimetic crisis” in which the group’s very existence is menaced by the potential violence of rivalry over the central object. The emission of the first sign is the founding event of the human community. How is this hypothetical scene to be situated in the course of biological evolution? Over the years my thinking on this subject has evolved; or perhaps I should say: has been purified. When I wrote The Origin of Language, I was uniquely concerned to develop the consequences of the hypothesis that language originated in a self-conscious event or scene. Thus I made no reference to the specific historical circumstances or even to the geological era in which such an event might have taken place. From the perspective of an empirical scientist, this would have been inconceivable, but I considered it the humanist’s duty to develop the logical consequences of the idea of the human as the possessor of language independently of the vagaries of empirical data. I sought to construct a hypothesis limited by Ockham’s razor to the minimal conditions of the emergence of the human.”

— Eric Gans, The Little Bang: The Early Origin of Language · Spring 1999 · Anthropoetics