题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：困难
山东省滨州市博兴县、阳信县2020-2021学年高二下学期英语期中联考试卷
While we know that language first appeared among Homo sapiens (智人) somewhere thousands of years ago, the secret to how language evolved is still unknown, and mainstream theories fall into two distinctly different camps.
One widely held theory is that language came about as an evolutionary adaptation. That was where the idea of natural selection came into play, which was the belief that the specific physical features of a population made that population more likely to survive its environment, like the turtle (海龟) and its shell. On one hand, humans needed to communicate with each other in order to hunt，farm and defend themselves successfully from the surrounding severe environment. Being able to communicate by using language gave the human species a distinct survival advantage. On the other hand, language was needed for social interaction, according to those who subscribed to the adaptation theory.
In their paper "Natural Language and Natural Selection," researchers Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom theorized that a series of calls or gestures evolved over time into combinations, giving us complex communication, or language. As things became more complicated around them, humans needed a more complex system to convey information to one another. Early man saw a group of deer he wanted to hunt. He made a sound to his hunting partner that means "deer are nearby." One day, a storm came in and the hunter noticed that thunder scared the deer away. As a result, the hunter went hungry until the storm passed. Over time, the same hunter also learned to recognize the warning signs for bad weather-dark skies and increased wind. Early man realized that when the sky darkened and the wind picked up, he needed to tell his hunting partner to speed up the pursuit of the deer. Therefore, he came up with a series of sounds that refer to both the deer and the bad weather. That series of sounds was the beginning of an evolutionary adaptation that eventually became language.
As humans learned more about how to best survive, they developed a need to convey these survival methods to their population. To be brief, that's the adaptation theory.
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