ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
dictionary definitions. The human brain is a primate brain, and as such, bears distinct
similarities to non-human brains, despite the obvious and incredible semiotic/linguistic range displayed by homo sapiens. The structures are biological,xix not linguistic. “It is far more reasonable to expect language processes to be broken up into
subfunctions that have more to do with neural logic than with linguistic logic” (Deacon, 1997: 288).
A brief glance at any literary tradition – Egyptian literature (Foster), early Greek poetry like Archilochus and Sappho (Constantine, et al.), the Epic of Gilgamesh (Gardner)
– shows that these texts quickly push past the merely cultural and environmental concerns of the authors. It reveals a stunning singularity among the many voices of primary concerns like sustaining life, the rearing of children, mate selection, not just the
more philosophical and religious quandaries of who and where and when. As has been
shown, human language is entirely bound up in neural activity, and that neural activity
is at least connected to an evolved primate brain, which bears some stamp of its evolutionary heritage. The addition of technologies like paper have given something like a
fossil record to the words and shapes of ideas of early civilizations’ oral antecedents.
Scholars like Milman Parry, in the early twentieth century, discovered the mnemonic
and structural similarities between Homeric verse and Serbocroatian oral poetry (Parry: 1971), suggesting that human brains have not changed much – and more pointedly
do