child points at something, wishing for his parents to notice it, and calling it by a name. The child is in fact attempting to align his experience with that of his parents, and to verify that they are translating that experience into language in the same way. Humans engage in acts of mutual-identification throughout their lives, constantly testing and affirming the way in which their experiences are translated into language. Symbolic landscape Dor defines the symbolic landscape as a semantic web formed out of past language events, modelling in its inner dynamics the world of private experience, only in a more simplified, normative way. Every lexical item in the symbolic landscape is a discrete instructor of the imagination, and is semantically connected to other lexical items in the landscape. Private experience, Dor argues, is never fully aligned with the symbolic landscape, but instead the two are constantly affecting one another. Although private experience is to some extent primed towards linguistic expression, some aspects of it inevitably remain inexpressible. This inherent discrepancy between the two means that the work of mutual identification for language is never finished, and partially explains humans’ compulsive need to share their experiences. Mimetic origins of language Dor builds on Merlin Donald’s theory of mimetic communication, an hypothesized precursor of language which included manual, facial, vocal and bodily gestures that were both intentional and representational, but were not compositional or arbitrary. This form of communication, Dor argues, evolved along with a growing codependency of humans, who became increasingly dependent on social learning and cooperative activities (tool-making, hunting and foraging, as well as alloparenting). Critically, mimetic communication and increased prosociality would have allowed for more frequent and elaborate mutual identification. Dor suggests that these developments would eventually initiate an evolutionary spiral: new cooperative behaviors would continuously require upgrades to the communication technology, these upgrades would enable new cooperative behaviors and increase codependence, which would require further communicative upgrades, and so on. This background is hypothesized to have provided the scaffold for a new communication technology, based on an instructive rather than an experiential strategy, and allowing humans to communicate about things that are beyond their shared experiential environment. Culturally-driven evolution of language Dor, along with Eva Jablonka, and based on evolutionary developmental biology, developed a theory of language evolution in which cultural learning and invention are hypothesized to have preceded and to have guided changes in the genome