Hypermobility, also known as double-jointedness, describes joints that stretch farther than normal. For example, some hypermobile people can bend their thumbs backwards to their wrists and bend their knee joints backwards, put their leg behind the head or perform other contortionist "tricks". It can affect one or more joints throughout the body.

Hypermobile joints are common and occur in about 10 to 25% of the population, but in a minority of people, pain and other symptoms are present. This may be a sign of what is known as joint hypermobility syndrome (JMS) or, more recently, hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD). Hypermobile joints are a feature of genetic connective tissue disorders such as hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD) or Ehlers–Danlos syndromes (EDS). Until new diagnostic criteria were introduced, hypermobility syndrome was sometimes considered identical to hypermobile Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (hEDS), formerly called EDS Type 3. As no genetic test can distinguish the two conditions and because of the similarity of the diagnostic criteria and recommended treatments, many experts recommend they be recognized as the same condition until further research is undertaken.

In 2016 the diagnostic criteria for hEDS were re-written to be more restrictive, with the intent of narrowing the pool of hEDS patients in the hope of making it easier to identify a common genetic mutation, hEDS being the only EDS variant without a diagnostic DNA test. At the same time, joint hypermobility syndrome was renamed as hypermobility spectrum disorder and redefined as a hypermobility disorder that does not meet the diagnostic criteria for hEDS, other types of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, or other heritable Connective Tissue Disorder (such as Marfan's, Loeys-Dietz, or osteogenesis imperfecta).

Signs and symptoms

People with Joint Hypermobility Syndrome may develop other conditions caused by their unstable joints. These conditions include:
 Joint instability causing frequent sprains, tendinitis, or bursitis when doing activities that would not affect others
 Joint pain
 Early-onset osteoarthritis (as early as during teen years)
 Subluxations or dislocations, especially in the shoulder (severe limits on one's ability to push, pull, grasp, finger, reach, etc., is considered a disability by the US Social Security Administration)
 Knee pain
 Fatigue, even after short periods of exercise
 Back pain, prolapsed discs or spondylolisthesis
 Joints that make clicking noises (also a symptom of osteoarthritis)
 Susceptibility to whiplash
 Temporomandibular joint dysfunction, also known as TMD
 Increased nerve compression disorders (such as carpal tunnel syndrome)
 The ability of finger locking
 Poor response to anaesthetic or pain medication
 "Growing pains" as described in children in late afternoon or night

Associated conditions
Those with hypermobile joints are more likely to have ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, fibromyalgia, hereditary connective tissue disorders, mitral valve prolapse, and anxiety disorders such as panic disorder.

Causes

Hypermobility generally results from one or more of the following:
 Abnormally shaped ends of one or more bones at a joint
 A defect of Type 1 collagen (as found in Ehlers–Danlos syndrome) or other connective tissue (as found in Loeys–Dietz syndrome and Marfan syndrome) resulting in weakened ligaments/ligamentous laxity, muscles and tendons. This same defect also results in weakened bones, which may result in osteoporosis and fractures.
 Abnormal joint proprioception (an impaired ability to locate body parts in space and/or monitor an extended joint)

These abnormalities cause abnormal joint stress, meaning that the joints can wear out, leading to osteoarthritis.

The condition tends to run in families, suggesting a genetic basis for at least some forms of hypermobility. The term double jointed is often used to describe hypermobility; however, the name is a misnomer and should not be taken literally, as hypermobile joints are not doubled/extra in any sense.

Most people have hypermobility with no other symptoms. Approximately 5% of the healthy population have one or more hypermobile joints. However, people with "joint hypermobility syndrome" are subject to many difficulties. For example, their joints may be easily injured, be more prone to complete dislocation due to the weakly stabilized joint and they may develop problems from muscle fatigue (as muscles must work harder to compensate for weakness in the ligaments that support the joints). Hypermobility syndrome can lead to chronic pain or even disability in severe cases. Musical instrumentalists with hypermobile fingers may have difficulties when fingers collapse into the finger locking position. Or, conversely, they may display superior abilities due to their increased range of motion for fingering, such as in playing a violin or cello.

Hypermobility may be symptomatic of a serious medical condition, such as Stickler syndrome, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, Marfan syndrome, Loeys–Dietz syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, osteogenesis imperfecta, lupus, polio, Fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, Morquio syndrome, cleidocranial dysostosis or myotonia congenita.

Hypermobility has been associated with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. Hypermobility causes physical trauma (in the form of joint dislocations, joint subluxations, joint instability, sprains, etc.). These conditions often, in turn, cause physical and/or emotional trauma and are possible triggers for conditions such as fibromyalgia.

Women with hypermobility may experience particular difficulties when pregnant. During pregnancy, the body releases relaxin and certain hormones that alter ligament physiology, easing the stretching needed to accommodate fetal growth as well as the birthing process. The combination of hypermobility and pregnancy-related pelvic girdle during pregnancy can be debilitating. The pregnant woman with hypermobile joints will often be in significant pain as muscles and joints adapt to the pregnancy. Pain often inhibits such women from standing or walking during pregnancy. The pregnant patient may be forced to use a bedpan and/or a wheelchair during pregnancy and may experience permanent disability.

Symptoms of hypermobility include a dull but intense pain around the knee and ankle joints and the soles of the feet. The pain and discomfort affecting these body parts can be alleviated by using custom orthoses.

Syndromes

Hypermobility syndrome is generally considered to comprise hypermobility together with other symptoms, such as myalgia and arthralgia. It is relatively common among children and affects more females than males.

Current thinking suggests four causative factors:
 The shape of the ends of the bones—Some joints normally have a large range of movement, such as the shoulder and hip. Both are ball-and-socket joints. If a shallow rather than a deep socket is inherited, a relatively large range of movement will be possible. If the socket is particularly shallow, then the joint may dislocate easily.
 Protein deficiency or hormone problems—Ligaments are made up of several types of protein fibre. These proteins include elastin, which gives elasticity and which may be altered in some people. Female sex hormones alter collagen proteins. Women are generally more supple just before a period and even more so in the latter stages of pregnancy, because of a hormone called relaxin that allows the pelvis to expand so the head of the baby can pass. Joint mobility differs by race, which may reflect differences in collagen protein structure. People from the Indian sub-continent, for example, often have more supple hands than Caucasians.
 Muscle tone—The tone of muscles is controlled by the nervous system, and influences range of movement. Special techniques can change muscle tone and increase flexibility. Yoga, for example, can help to relax muscles and make the joints more supple. However, yoga is not recommended by most medical professionals for people with Joint Hypermobility Syndrome, due to the likelihood of damage to the joints. Gymnasts and athletes can sometimes acquire hypermobility in some joints through activity.
 Proprioception—Compromised ability to detect exact joint/body position with closed eyes, may lead to overstretching and hypermobile joints.

Hypermobility can also be caused by connective tissue disorders, such as Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (EDS) and Marfan syndrome. Joint hypermobility is a common symptom for both. EDS has numerous sub-types; most include hypermobility in some degree. When hypermobility is the main symptom, then EDS/hypermobility type is likely. People with EDS-HT experience frequent joint dislocations and subluxations (partial/incomplete dislocations), with or without trauma, sometimes spontaneously. Commonly, hypermobility is dismissed by medical professionals as nonsignificant.

Ehlers–Danlos syndrome hypermobility type
Joint hypermobility is often correlated with hypermobile Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (hEDS, known also by EDS type III or Ehlers–Danlos syndrome hypermobility type (EDS-HT)). Ehlers–Danlos syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by mutations or hereditary genes, but the genetic defect that produced hEDS is largely unknown. In conjunction with joint hypermobility, a common symptom for hEDS is smooth, velvety, and stretchy skin; a symptom largely unique to the syndrome. When diagnosing hEDS, the Beighton Criteria are used, but are not always able to distinguish between generalized hypermobility and hEDS.

Ehlers–Danlos hypermobility type can have severe musculoskeletal effects, including:
 Jaw laxity that may make an individual's jaw open and close like a hinge, as well as open further than the average.
 Neck pain that can lead to chronic headaches and is usually associated with a crackling or grinding sensation (crepitus).
 The spine may end up in a "round back" or inversely may extend too much into hyperlordosis. Individuals may also experience scoliosis.
 Joints commonly associated with hypermobility (wrists, knees, ankles, elbows, shoulders) may be at more severe risk to dislocate or strain.

Diagnosis
Joint hypermobility syndrome shares symptoms with other conditions such as Marfan syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and osteogenesis imperfecta. Experts in connective tissue disorders formally agreed that severe forms of Hypermobility Syndrome and mild forms of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Hypermobility Type are the same disorder.

Generalized hypermobility is a common feature in all these hereditary connective tissue disorders and many features overlap, but often features are present that enable differentiating these disorders.
The inheritance pattern of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome varies by type. The arthrochalasia, classic, hypermobility and vascular forms usually have an autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance. Autosomal dominant inheritance occurs when one copy of a gene in each cell is sufficient to cause a disorder. In some cases, an affected person inherits the mutation from one affected parent. Other cases result from new (sporadic) gene mutations. Such cases can occur in people with no history of the disorder in their family.

The dermatosparaxis and kyphoscoliosis types of EDS and some cases of the classic and hypermobility forms, are inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern. In autosomal recessive inheritance, two copies of the gene in each cell are altered. Most often, both parents of an individual with an autosomal recessive disorder are carriers of one copy of the altered gene but do not show signs and symptoms of the disorder.

Beighton criteria

As of July 2000, hypermobility was diagnosed using the Beighton criteria. In 2017, the criteria changed, but still involve the Beighton score. The Beighton criteria do not replace the Beighton score but instead use the previous score in conjunction with other symptoms and criteria. HMS is diagnosed in the presence of either two major criteria, one major and two minor criteria, or four minor criteria. The criteria are:

Major criteria
 A Beighton score of 5/9 or more (either current or historic)
 Arthralgia for more than three months in four or more joints

Minor criteria
 A Beighton score of 1, 2 or 3/9 (0, 1, 2 or 3 if aged 50+)
 Arthralgia (> 3 months) in one to three joints or back pain (> 3 months), spondylosis, spondylolysis/spondylolisthesis.
 Dislocation/subluxation in more than one joint, or in one joint on more than one occasion.
 Soft tissue rheumatism. > 3 lesions (e.g. epicondylitis, tenosynovitis, bursitis).
 Marfanoid habitus (tall, slim, span/height ratio >1.03, upper: lower segment ratio less than 0.89, arachnodactyly; positive Steinberg finger / Walker wrist signs).
 Abnormal skin: striae, hyperextensibility, thin skin, papyraceous scarring.

Beighton score

The Beighton score is an edited version of the Carter/Wilkinson scoring system which was used for many years as an indicator of widespread hyper-mobility. Medical professionals varied in their interpretations of the results; some accepting as low as 1/9 and some 4/9 as a diagnosis of HMS. Therefore, it was incorporated, with clearer guidelines, into the Beighton Criteria. The Beighton score is measured by adding 1 point for each of the following:
 Placing flat hands on the floor with straight legs
 Left knee bending backward
 Right knee bending backward
 Left elbow bending backward
 Right elbow bending backward
 Left thumb touching the forearm
 Right thumb touching the forearm
 Left little finger bending backward past 90 degrees
 Right little finger bending backward past 90 degrees

Treatments

Physical therapy

It is important that hypermobile individuals remain fit – even more so than the average individual – to prevent recurrent injuries. Regular exercise and exercise that is supervised by a physician and physical therapist can reduce symptoms because strong muscles increase dynamic joint stability. Low-impact exercise such as closed kinetic chain exercises are usually recommended as they are less likely to cause injury when compared to high-impact exercise or contact sports.

Heat and cold treatment can help temporarily to relieve the pain of aching joints and muscles but does not address the underlying problems.

Medication

Medication is not the primary treatment for hypermobility, but can be used as an adjunct treatment for related joint pain. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are the primary medications of choice. Narcotics are not recommended for primary or long-term treatment and are reserved for short-term use after acute injury.

Lifestyle modification

For some people with hypermobility, lifestyle changes decrease symptom severity. In general, activity that increases pain is to be avoided. For example:
 Typing can reduce pain from writing.
 Voice control software or a more ergonomic keyboard can reduce pain from typing.
 Bent knees or sitting can reduce pain from standing.
 Unwanted symptoms are frequently reduced by some forms of yoga and weightlifting.
 Use of low impact elliptical trainer machines can replace high-impact running.
 Pain-free swimming may require a kickboard or extra care to avoid hyperextending elbow and other joints.
 Weakened ligaments and muscles contribute to poor posture, which may contribute to other medical conditions.
 Isometric exercise avoids hyperextension and contributes to strength.

Other treatments
 Bracing can be helpful for temporarily protecting unstable joints.

Epidemiology
Hypermobile joints occur in about 10 to 25% of the population.

See also
 Ligamentous laxity

References

External links

Ehlers–Danlos syndrome
Disorders of fascia
Syndromes
Arthritis
Skeletal disorders
Rheumatology
Contortion

Hypermobility (joints)


Francesco Clemente (born 23 March 1952) is an Italian contemporary artist. He has lived at various times in Italy, India and New York City. Some of his work is influenced by the traditional art and culture of India. He has worked in various artistic media including drawing, fresco, graphics, mosaic, oils and sculpture. He was among the principal figures in the Italian Transavanguardia movement of the 1980s, which was characterised by a rejection of Formalism and conceptual art and a return to figurative art and Symbolism.

Life
Clemente was born in 1952 in Naples, in Campania in southern Italy. In 1970 he enrolled in the faculty of architecture of the Sapienza, the university of Rome, but did not complete a degree there. In Rome he came into contact with contemporary artists such as Luigi Ontani and Alighiero Boetti, who had come to the city at about the same time, and also with the American Cy Twombly, who lived there. Boetti, who was ten years older, became both a friend and a mentor; in 1974 they visited Afghanistan together. With Ontani, Clemente gave performances at the Galleria L'Attico. Despite his close involvement with these artists associated with the Arte povera movement, and his interest in others such as Pino Pascali and Michelangelo Pistoletto, Clemente preferred to work on paper. He made ink drawings of dreams and recollections of his childhood, and in 1971, in his first solo show, exhibited collages at the Galleria Giulia in Rome.

In 1973 Clemente made the first of many visits to India. He established a studio in Madras (now Chennai), and became interested in both the religious and folk traditions of India and in the traditional art and crafts of the country. In 1976 and 1977 he visited the library of the Theosophical Society of Madras to study the religious texts there. In 1980 and 1981 he worked on Francesco Clemente Pinxit, a series of twenty-four gouaches on antique hand-made rag paper, in collaboration with miniature painters from Orissa and Jaipur. In 1982 he moved to New York City.. He lives in Greenwich Village.

Work

Clemente's work has been widely shown. His early large canvases, painted in 1981–1982, were exhibited in 1983 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and then in Germany and Sweden. In 1986 the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, mounted a travelling exhibition of his work. Clemente participated in the Biennale di Venezia in 1988, 1993, 1995 and 1997; in documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1992 and 1997; and in the Whitney Biennial, also in 1997. Solo shows were held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990; at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1991;  at the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 1994; at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Bologna in 1999; at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000; at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli in Naples in 2002–2003; at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2004; at Palazzo Sant'Elia in Palermo, in Sicily, in 2013; at both the Coro della Maddalena in Alba and Santa Maria della Scala in Siena in 2016; and at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2017.

In 1998 his work was used in the film Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

See also
 265924 Franceclemente, asteroid

References

Further reading

 Seidel, Max. Francesco Clemente: The Tarots. Hirmer Publishers. 2012.
 Clemente, Francesco; Hollein, Max and Walcott, Derek. Francesco Clemente: Palimpsest. Moderne Kunst Nürnberg. 2012.
 Danto, C. Artur. Francesco Clemente: The Sopranos. Charta. 2008.
 Clemente, Francesco; Walcott, Derek. Francesco Clemente: Three Rainbows. Charta. 2009.
 Clemente, Francesco; Danto, Arthur. Francesco Clemente: A Private Geography. Charta. 2011.
 Jain, Jyotindra. Clemente: Made in India. Charta. 2011.
 Ammann, Jean- Christophe; Clemente, Francesco. Francesco Clemente: Works 1971–1979. Charta. 2007.
 Matthews, Harry. Singular Pleasures. Dalkey Archive Press. 1999.
 Clemente, Francesco. Francesco Clemente. Charta. 2000.
 Babini, Luca. Francesco Clemente: Art and Life. Aperture Foundation. 1999.
 Rushdie, Salman. Francesco Clemente: Self Portraits. Gagosian Gallery. 2005.
 Clemente, Francesco. Polaroids, Celebrities and Self-Portraits. Jablonka Galerie. 2001.
 Fahey, David; Clemente, Francesco. Sante D'Orazio: A Private View. Prestel Publishing. 2006.
 Clemente, Francesco. India. Twelvetrees Press. 1989.
 Rimanelli, David. Francesco Clemente Paintings 2000–2003. Gagosian Gallery. 2003.
 Clemente, Francesco. Francesco Clemte: Fifty One Days at Mount Abu.  D'Offay, Anthony Gallery. 1999.
 Fischl, Eric; Ammann, Jean-Christophe; Young, Geoffrey; Clemente, Francesco. Eric Fischl: It's Where I look...It's How I See... Their World, My World, The World. Mary Boone Gallery/ Jablonka Gallery. 2009.
 Auping, Michael. Francesco Clemente. Abrams, Harry N., Inc. 1985.
 Colombo, Paulo. Francesco Clemente. Electa. 2006.
 Avedon, Elizabeth. Francesco Clemente. Knopf Publishing Group. 1987.
 Katz, Vincent. Life Is Paradise: The Portraits of Francesco Clemente. Powerhouse Books. 1999.
 McLure, Michael. Francesco Clemente Testa Coda. Rizzoli. 1992.
 Percy, Ann. Francesco Clemente: Three Worlds. Rizzoli. 1990.
 Percy, Ann. Francesco Clemente: Three Worlosi. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 1998.
 Warner, Marina. Francesco Clemente: The Book of the Sea. Gagosian Gallery. 2002.
 Shapiro, David. Francesco Clemente. Parkett Verlag AG. 1986.
 Valli, Giambattista. Giambattista Valli. Rizzoli. 16 October 2012.
 Denninson, Lisa. Clemente: A Retrospective. Abrams, Harry N., Inc. 1999.
 Crone, Rainer. Francesco Clemente: Pastelle 1972–1983 Prestel Verlag GmbH & Co KG. 1984.
 Eccher, Danilo. Francesco Clemente. Allemandi, Umberto & Company. 1999.
 Walcott, Derek. A Conversion, exhibition catalogue. Deitch Projects, New York, Edizioni Charta, Milano 2009.
 Rushdie, Salman. Being Francesco Clemente, in: Francesco Clemente: Self Portraits, exhibition catalogue. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2006. Pages .
 Kort, Pamela. Francesco Clemente in Conversation with Pamela Kort, New York, 26 March 2011; in: Francesco Clemente, Palimpsest, exhibition catalogue. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2011.

1952 births
Living people
Artists from Naples
Italian contemporary artists
20th-century Italian painters
20th-century Italian male artists
Italian male painters
Italian emigrants to the United States
Italian watercolourists
Artists from Greenwich Village
Transavanguardia
Neo-expressionist artists

Francesco Clemente


The Old Maid's Orchard Mound is a Native American mound in the central portion of the U.S. state of Ohio.  Located near the village of Lithopolis in Fairfield County, the mound lies within the boundaries of Chestnut Ridge Metro Park, in northern Bloom Township.

One of several burial mounds east of Lithopolis, the Old Maid's Orchard Mound sits in an area of small fruit trees and underbrush.  Measuring  tall, it has changed little with the passage of time; cultivation of the area around the orchard damaged its northern side, and rodents have dug holes in the mound, but its integrity has been little compromised.  Archaeologists have concluded that the mound was constructed by people of the Adena culture, due to its location and its shape.  Mounds built by the Adena people typically cover burials, postholes that formed the foundations of houses, or other manmade features; as a result, the Old Maid's Orchard Mound is a valuable archaeological site.  In recognition of its archaeological significance, the mound was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.  It is one of five Fairfield County mound sites to be included on the Register, along with the Theodore B. Schaer Mound near Canal Winchester, the Tarlton Cross Mound near Tarlton, the Coon Hunters Mound near Carroll, and the Fortner Mounds near Pickerington.

References

External links
 from the Ohio Historical Society

Adena culture
Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Ohio
National Register of Historic Places in Fairfield County, Ohio
Mounds in Ohio

Old Maid's Orchard Mound


Arabella Fermor (1696–1737) was the daughter of a marriage between two recusant Roman Catholic families in Protestant England, the Fermors of Oxfordshire and the Brownes of Berkshire. The family seat was Tusmore House, noted for its formal gardens.

Her beauty was made famous by her starring role in Alexander Pope's famous poem The Rape of the Lock. After her beau Robert Petre brought about the dissolution of their engagement by stealing a lock of her hair (satirically related in the poem), Fermor married Francis Perkins of Ufton Court around 1715. She bore one daughter, Arabella, who died as a child, and five sons.

References

People from Ufton Nervet
1696 births
1737 deaths

Arabella Fermor


was one of three kingdoms which controlled Okinawa in the 14th century. Okinawa, previously controlled by a number of local chieftains or lords, loosely bound by a paramount chieftain or king of the entire island, split into these three more solidly defined kingdoms within a few years after 1314; the Sanzan period thus began, and would end roughly one hundred years later, when Chūzan's King Shō Hashi conquered Hokuzan in 1419 and Nanzan in 1429.

The united Okinawan state was called the Ryūkyū Kingdom, but would continue to be referred to as "Chūzan" in various official documents of the Ryukyuan royal government, and those of many other states in the region.

History
Tamagusuku succeeded his father Eiji as king of Okinawa at the age of nineteen, in 1314. However, he lacked the charisma or leadership abilities to command the respect and loyalty of the various territorial lords (aji), and many rebelled soon afterwards. The Lord of Ozato fled south and, along with his followers, formed the kingdom of Nanzan (南山, Southern Mountain), while the Lord of Nakijin, based some distance to the north, declared himself king of Hokuzan (北山, Northern Mountain). Thus, Tamagusuku, in Urasoe, became king of Chūzan.

Tamagusuku died in 1336, and was succeeded by his son Seii, then ten years of age. Seii's reign was relatively short, and defined by the interference and political abuses of his mother which led to an erosion of what little support the young king may have had from the territorial lords. It is important to note that the three "kingdoms" were little different from the loosely unified chiefdoms which came before, and the "kings" did not wield considerably greater power, nor were their administrations more organized or more politically stable than what came before. However, this became gradually less true over the generations; the king's power and organization advanced considerably by the time all three kingdoms were unified as the Kingdom of Ryukyu.

Seii was overthrown by the lord of Urasoe around 1349–1355; the reign of the new king, Satto, marked the emergence of Chūzan as a small but not insignificant player in regional trade and politics. A number of domestic policies and foreign relations begun at this time would continue until the end of the kingdom five hundred years later. Satto established diplomatic and trade relations with a number of states in the region, including the Ayutthaya Kingdom of Thailand and Joseon Dynasty of Korea, and saw the beginnings of Ryukyu's role in a flourishing system of regional trade. The first Ming Dynasty envoys arrived in Okinawa in 1372, marking the beginning of tributary relations with China. From then on, Chūzan (and unified Ryukyu later) would send frequent tribute missions, and would rely upon the Chinese court to officially recognize each successive Ryukyuan king with a formal statement of investiture. China would have an incredibly strong influence on Ryukyu for the next five hundred years, politically, economically, and culturally, as it did with its numerous other tributary states.

This period also saw the beginnings of a bureaucracy in the royal government which would later grow to rule in the king's place and in his name, replacing direct monarchical rule. Kumemura, a community for Chinese immigrants was established; the Chinese living here, and their Ryukyuan descendants, would serve Chūzan (and later the unified kingdom) as diplomats, interpreters, and government officials. Kumemura quickly grew into Ryukyu's cultural capital, something of a complement to the political capital at Shuri and the commercial center at the port of Naha. A community for Ryukyuan envoys and scholars was similarly established in Fukien in China, and the first Ryukyuans to study in China's capital did so at this time as well, again establishing precedents for developments which would continue for centuries.

Satto's son Bunei succeeded him in 1395, and oversaw the continuation of the policies and developments of his father's reign. Relations with China grew stronger, and a number of institutions were established to cater to Chinese envoys to Chūzan. Trade boomed, and relations with other countries likewise continued to be expanded. Though China accepted tributary missions from Hokuzan and Nanzan as well at this time, they officially recognized only the King of Chūzan as a head of state in Ryukyu. Chūzan continued to enjoy formal diplomatic relations with Ayutthaya and Korea, and trade relations with Java, Sumatra, and other states, as did the other two Ryukyuan kingdoms. However, only Chūzan managed to establish formal relations with Japan's Ashikaga shogunate, having sent a mission in 1403. These political advantages, coupled with control of Naha, the most active port on Okinawa, allowed Chūzan to gain significant political and economic superiority over its two neighbors. It also benefited greatly culturally; trade always brings cultural exchange along with it, and many of the states in the region were experiencing great cultural surges as a result. In particular, it is believed that Buddhism from Korea and Shintō from Japan were first introduced to Okinawa to a significant extent at this time. Students and other travelers to Korea brought back texts, statues, rituals, and other Buddhist objects and ideas, and in exchange, King Bunei promised to send shipwrecked Koreans, and those who were the victims of Japanese pirates (), back home safely.

Domestically, Bunei's reign saw significant development in the organization and formalization of the royal administration, and increased literacy and education among the administrative officials. Government documents, particularly those concerning trade and diplomacy, were first compiled in 1403. This compilation, the "Treasury of Royal Succession", is called  in the Japanese pronunciation, and continued to be compiled fairly regularly until 1619. However, this increased organization was not accompanied by political stability; the kings of Nanzan and Hokuzan, along with the emperor of China, all died within the span of just a few years (1395–1398). These events heightened tensions between the three kingdoms, all of which sought the favor of the Ming court, which was largely unresponsive; Bunei only received his formal investiture in 1406, ten years after succeeding his father, and less than a year before his own death.

As a result of these political instabilities, the  (local territorial lords) began to seize more power for themselves within their tiny local domains. One , by the name of Hashi, deposed his neighboring lord of Azato in 1402 and seized his territory. Five years later, he led a rebellion and overthrew Bunei, establishing his own father, Shishō, as King of Chūzan. Hashi effectively ruled from the behind the scenes, and led Chūzan's army against the neighboring kingdoms, conquering Hokuzan in 1419 and Nanzan in 1429. In the intervening years, he formally succeeded his father to the throne and received investiture and the dynastic family name "Shang" (,  in Japanese or Okinawan) from the Ming court. Thus, the three kingdoms were united into the Ryūkyū Kingdom;  was not truly abolished, and the term  continued to be used to refer to the unified kingdom, or its king, up until the late 19th century.

Notes

References
Kerr, George H. (2000). Okinawa: the History of an Island People. (revised ed.) Boston: Tuttle Publishing.

1872 disestablishments in Asia
States and territories established in 1314
Ryukyu Kingdom
Ryukyu Islands
Former kingdoms
Tributaries of Imperial China

Chūzan


The Monteagle Sunday School Assembly (MSSA) is an interdenominational religious organization based in Monteagle, Tennessee. It was chartered by the state of Tennessee on October 31, 1882, with the purpose of
the advancement of science, literary attainment, Sunday School interests, and the promotion of the broadest popular culture in the interest of Christianity without regard to sect or denomination.
The MSSA was one of hundreds of similar Assemblies patterned after the Chautauqua Institution in New York in the late 19th century, of which only nine or ten remain active. In 1982, Monteagle Sunday School Assembly celebrated its 100th year of continuous operation and its grounds were placed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.

The MSSA conducts a variety of spiritual, educational, cultural, and health development activities for all ages during an eight-week season each summer and through retreats and other activities throughout the year. Assembly members represent 23 different states and the District of Columbia. Many belong to fifth-generation families who return each summer to pursue spiritual and intellectual enlightenment, to strengthen family ties, and to engage in Christian fellowship and mission.

History
The MSSA was founded in 1882 by the Sunday School Convention of Tennessee, which sought to establish a "Sunday School Congress" in Tennessee. At the time, a number of states had these congresses, often called Assemblies, all of them modelled after the Chautauqua Institution in New York, which is regarded as the first of these Assemblies. They were meant not only as a place for religious activities, such as retreats, but also as places for higher learning at a time when there were few colleges and institutes available to people. The goal of the Assembly was to "combine Sunday School training with a broader program of educational and cultural pursuits". Monteagle Sunday School Assembly was founded as a Chautauqua for the members to grow spiritually and intellectually .

The MSSA opened for its first summer session on July 17, 1883. Although the Assembly began small with only an amphitheater and dining hall, the summer courses offered on the grounds attracted many students and teachers, as most southern schools didn't offer summer programs. The thousands of yearly visitors soon encouraged the Assembly to begin building projects which led to the creation of many cottages, public meeting halls and boarding rooms. In the 20th century, the MSSA, as well as a number of the other Assemblies modeled after Chautauqua, formed the International Chautauqua Alliance. This coalition brought the Assembly even greater popularity, and allowed it to begin showing guest ministers, lectures and entertainers from around the country during the summer season.

The World Wars and Great Depression severely hindered the revenues and popularity of the MSSA, forcing it to close many cottages and discontinue nearly half their programs; many other Assemblies were forced to shut down during this period. It was nearly 30 years before interest returned to the MSSA, leading to the restoration and refurbishing of many cottages, as well as the introduction of new programs and guest speakers. This reawakening of interest peaked in the 1980s, when the MSSA held its Centennial Celebration and was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The MSSA is one of only 9 surviving Assemblies in the United States, and still receives thousands of visitors a year.

Grounds
The Assembly grounds, which comprise the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly Historic District, constitute a large part of the area of the town of Monteagle. A stone gatehouse marks the entry to the grounds, which are served by narrow, winding roads. Most of the 162 buildings on the grounds are residences for Assembly participants, typically one- and two-story frame cottages with porches, featuring Queen Anne and Carpenter Gothic design elements. A chapel, library, dining hall, and several recreational structures are also provided. About 40 percent of the grounds are maintained as parkland.

Summer programs
The 8-week period from early June to August, referred to as the Season, is when the MSSA hosts its annual summer program. This includes a number of social, spiritual and cultural activities for all ages, as well as guest speakers, entertainers and ministers.

Religious activities
Often known as the cornerstone of the Assembly program, the number of spiritual activities appeal to Christians of all denominations, and community activities and prayer also help visitors and members get to know each other. The MSSA offers Sunday school and Sunday church, evening prayer [called Twilight Prayers], and a weekly guest minister and speaker, all of which take place in the Assembly's small but well-known church, Warren Chapel, designed along with the Harton (dining) Hall also on the mall, by renowned Nashville architect, Edwin A Keeble who was born in the Assembly in 1905 and died in Sewanee in 1979.

Cultural activities
The Assembly also offers culturally and socially enriching activities during the summer, which can include cottage tours, bazaars, flea markets and guest lecturers, as well as card parties and book clubs offered by the Monteagle Woman's Association.

Youth activities
By far, the widest range of activities are offered to 5-18 year-olds who come to the Assembly. There is no shortage of things for children and teens to do, and on any given day the Assembly could host evening movies, hiking excursions, youth groups, arts and crafts, and fu.

Guests and members
Although the MSSA offers popular summer programs, it has many year-round residents who live in the cottages on the grounds. MSSA, located six miles from Sewanee, The University of the South, has been a haven for many writers and artists, including Andrew Lytle and John Gaddis. Only members of MSSA may purchase homes and mortgages are not allowed. Many other people rent out their cottages to people during the summer, and some only stay for a few days at a nearby bed and breakfast.

References

External links
Monteagle Sunday School Assembly website
The Chautauqua Institution
New Piasa Chautauqua, Chautauqua, IL

Properties of religious function on the National Register of Historic Places in Tennessee
Victorian architecture in Tennessee
Religious organizations established in 1882
21st-century Chautauquas
Chautauqua
Monteagle, Tennessee
Buildings and structures in Grundy County, Tennessee
Religious buildings and structures in Tennessee
Christianity in Tennessee
Sunday schools
Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Tennessee
National Register of Historic Places in Grundy County, Tennessee

Monteagle Sunday School Assembly


The origin of speech is a topic that has faced consistent problems in explaining how human language evolved. The topic differs from the origin of language because language is not necessarily spoken; it could equally be written or signed. Language is a fundamental aspect of human communication and plays a vital role in the everyday lives of humans. It allows them to convey thoughts, emotions, and ideas, and providing the ability to connect with others and shape collective reality.

Many attempts have been made to explain scientifically how speech emerged in humans, although to date no theory has generated agreement.

Non-human primates, like many other animals, have evolved specialized mechanisms for producing sounds for purposes of social communication. On the other hand, no monkey or ape uses its tongue for such purposes. The human species' unprecedented use of the tongue, lips and other moveable parts seems to place speech in a quite separate category, making its evolutionary emergence an intriguing theoretical challenge in the eyes of many scholars.

Modality-independence

The term modality means the chosen representational format for encoding and transmitting information. A striking feature of language is that it is modality-independent. Should an impaired child be prevented from hearing or producing sound, its innate capacity to master a language may equally find expression in signing. Sign languages of the deaf are independently invented and have all the major properties of spoken language except for the modality of transmission. From this it appears that the language centres of the human brain must have evolved to function optimally, irrespective of the selected modality.

Animal communication systems routinely combine visible with audible properties and effects, but none is modality-independent. For example, no vocally-impaired whale, dolphin, or songbird could express its song repertoire equally in visual display. Indeed, in the case of animal communication, message and modality are not capable of being disentangled. Whatever message is being conveyed stems from the intrinsic properties of the signal.

Modality independence should not be confused with the ordinary phenomenon of multimodality. Monkeys and apes rely on a repertoire of species-specific "gesture-calls" – emotionally-expressive vocalisations inseparable from the visual displays which accompany them. Humans also have species-specific gesture-calls – laughs, cries, sobs, etc. – together with involuntary gestures accompanying speech. Many animal displays are polymodal in that each appears designed to exploit multiple channels simultaneously.

The human linguistic property of modality independence is conceptually distinct from polymodality. It allows the speaker to encode the informational content of a message in a single channel whilst switching between channels as necessary. Modern city-dwellers switch effortlessly between the spoken word and writing in its various forms – handwriting, typing, email, etc. Whichever modality is chosen, it can reliably transmit the full message content without external assistance of any kind. When talking on the telephone, for example, any accompanying facial or manual gestures, however natural to the speaker, are not strictly necessary. When typing or manually signing, conversely, there is no need to add sounds. In many Australian Aboriginal cultures, a section of the population – perhaps women observing a ritual taboo – traditionally restrict themselves for extended periods to a silent (manually-signed) version of their language. Then, when released from the taboo, these same individuals resume narrating stories by the fireside or in the dark, switching to pure sound without sacrifice of informational content.

Evolution of the speech organs

Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. Humans' first recourse is to encode their thoughts in sound – a method which depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus.

The speech organs evolved in the first instance not for speech but for more basic bodily functions such as feeding and breathing. Nonhuman primates have broadly similar organs, but with different neural controls. Non-human apes use their highly-flexible, maneuverable tongues for eating but not for vocalizing. When an ape is not eating, fine motor control over its tongue is deactivated. Either it is performing gymnastics with its tongue or it is vocalising; it cannot perform both activities simultaneously. Since this applies to mammals in general, Homo sapiens are exceptional in harnessing mechanisms designed for respiration and ingestion for the radically different requirements of articulate speech.

Possible semi-aquatic adaptations

Recent insights in human evolution – more specifically, human Pleistocene littoral evolution – may help understand how human speech evolved. One controversial suggestion is that certain pre-adaptations for spoken language evolved during a time when ancestral hominins lived close to river banks and lake shores rich in fatty acids and other brain-specific nutrients. Occasional wading or swimming may also have led to enhanced breath-control (breath-hold diving).

Independent lines of evidence suggest that "archaic" Homo spread intercontinentally along the Indian Ocean shores (they even reached overseas islands such as Flores) where they regularly dived for littoral foods such as shell- and crayfish, which are extremely rich in brain-specific nutrients, explaining Homo's brain enlargement. Shallow diving for seafoods requires voluntary airway control, a prerequisite for spoken language. Seafood such as shellfish generally does not require biting and chewing, but stone tool use and suction feeding. This finer control of the oral apparatus was arguably another biological pre-adaptation to human speech, especially for the production of consonants.

Tongue

The word "language" derives from the Latin lingua, "tongue". Phoneticians agree that the tongue is the most important speech articulator, followed by the lips. A natural language can be viewed as a particular way of using the tongue to express thought.

The human tongue has an unusual shape. In most mammals, it is a long, flat structure contained largely within the mouth. It is attached at the rear to the hyoid bone, situated below the oral level in the pharynx. In humans, the tongue has an almost circular sagittal (midline) contour, much of it lying vertically down an extended pharynx, where it is attached to a hyoid bone in a lowered position. Partly as a result of this, the horizontal (inside-the-mouth) and vertical (down-the-throat) tubes forming the supralaryngeal vocal tract (SVT) are almost equal in length (whereas in other species, the vertical section is shorter). As humans move their jaws up and down, the tongue can vary the cross-sectional area of each tube independently by about 10:1, altering formant frequencies accordingly. That the tubes are joined at a right angle permits pronunciation of the vowels [i], [u] and [a], which nonhuman primates cannot do. Even when not performed particularly accurately, in humans the articulatory gymnastics needed to distinguish these vowels yield consistent, distinctive acoustic results, illustrating the quantal nature of human speech sounds. It may not be coincidental that [i], [u] and [a] are the most common vowels in the world's languages. Human tongues are a lot shorter and thinner than other mammals and are composed of a large number of muscles, which helps shape a variety of sounds within the oral cavity. The diversity of sound production is also increased with the human's ability to open and close the airway, allowing varying amounts of air to exit through the nose. The fine motor movements associated with the tongue and the airway, make humans more capable of producing a wide range of intricate shapes in order to produce sounds at different rates and intensities.

Lips
In humans, the lips are important for the production of stops and fricatives, in addition to vowels. Nothing, however, suggests that the lips evolved for those reasons. During primate evolution, a shift from nocturnal to diurnal activity in tarsiers, monkeys and apes (the haplorhines) brought with it an increased reliance on vision at the expense of olfaction. As a result, the snout became reduced and the rhinarium or "wet nose" was lost. The muscles of the face and lips consequently became less constrained, enabling their co-option to serve purposes of facial expression. The lips also became thicker, and the oral cavity hidden behind became smaller. Hence, according to Ann MacLarnon, "the evolution of mobile, muscular lips, so important to human speech, was the exaptive result of the evolution of diurnality and visual communication in the common ancestor of haplorhines". It is unclear whether human lips have undergone a more recent adaptation to the specific requirements of speech.

Respiratory control
Compared with nonhuman primates, humans have significantly enhanced control of breathing, enabling exhalations to be extended and inhalations shortened as we speak. Whilst we are speaking, intercostal and interior abdominal muscles are recruited to expand the thorax and draw air into the lungs, and subsequently to control the release of air as the lungs deflate. The muscles concerned are markedly more innervated in humans than in nonhuman primates. Evidence from fossil hominins suggests that the necessary enlargement of the vertebral canal, and therefore spinal cord dimensions, may not have occurred in Australopithecus or Homo erectus but was present in the Neanderthals and early modern humans.

Larynx

The larynx or voice box is an organ in the neck housing the vocal folds, which are responsible for phonation. In humans, the larynx is descended, it is positioned lower than in other primates. This is because the evolution of humans to an upright position shifted the head directly above the spinal cord, forcing everything else downward. The repositioning of the larynx resulted in a longer cavity called the pharynx, which is responsible for increasing the range and clarity of the sound being produced. Other primates have almost no pharynx; therefore, their vocal power is significantly lower. Humans are not unique in this respect: goats, dogs, pigs and tamarins lower the larynx temporarily, to emit loud calls. Several deer species have a permanently lowered larynx, which may be lowered still further by males during their roaring displays. Lions, jaguars, cheetahs and domestic cats also do this. However, laryngeal descent in nonhumans (according to Philip Lieberman) is not accompanied by descent of the hyoid; hence the tongue remains horizontal in the oral cavity, preventing it from acting as a pharyngeal articulator.

Despite all this, scholars remain divided as to how "special" the human vocal tract really is. It has been shown that the larynx does descend to some extent during development in chimpanzees, followed by hyoidal descent. As against this, Philip Lieberman points out that only humans have evolved permanent and substantial laryngeal descent in association with hyoidal descent, resulting in a curved tongue and two-tube vocal tract with 1:1 proportions. Uniquely in the human case, simple contact between the epiglottis and velum is no longer possible, disrupting the normal mammalian separation of the respiratory and digestive tracts during swallowing. Since this entails substantial costs – increasing the risk of choking whilst swallowing food – we are forced to ask what benefits might have outweighed those costs. Some claim the clear benefit must have been speech, but other contest this. One objection is that humans are in fact not seriously at risk of choking on food: medical statistics indicate that accidents of this kind are extremely rare. Another objection is that in the view of most scholars, speech as we know it emerged relatively late in human evolution, roughly contemporaneously with the emergence of Homo sapiens. A development as complex as the reconfiguration of the human vocal tract would have required much more time, implying an early date of origin. This discrepancy in timescales undermines the idea that human vocal flexibility was initially driven by selection pressures for speech.

At least one orangutan has demonstrated the ability to control the voice box.

The size exaggeration hypothesis
To lower the larynx is to increase the length of the vocal tract, in turn lowering formant frequencies so that the voice sounds "deeper" – giving an impression of greater size. John Ohala argued that the function of the lowered larynx in humans, especially males, is probably to enhance threat displays rather than speech itself. Ohala pointed out that if the lowered larynx were an adaptation for speech, we would expect adult human males to be better adapted in this respect than adult females, whose larynx is considerably less low. In fact, females invariably outperform males in verbal tests, falsifying this whole line of reasoning. William Tecumseh Fitch likewise argues that this was the original selective advantage of laryngeal lowering in humans. Although, according to Fitch, the initial lowering of the larynx in humans had nothing to do with speech, the increased range of possible formant patterns was subsequently co-opted for speech. Size exaggeration remains the sole function of the extreme laryngeal descent observed in male deer. Consistent with the size exaggeration hypothesis, a second descent of the larynx occurs at puberty in humans, although only in males. In response to the objection that the larynx is descended in human females, Fitch suggests that mothers vocalising to protect their infants would also have benefited from this ability.

Neanderthal speech

Most specialists credit the Neanderthals with speech abilities not radically different from those of modern Homo sapiens. An indirect line of argument is that their toolmaking and hunting tactics would have been difficult to learn or execute without some kind of speech. A recent extraction of DNA from Neanderthal bones indicates that Neanderthals had the same version of the FOXP2 gene as modern humans. This gene, mistakenly described as the "grammar gene", plays a role in controlling the orofacial movements which (in modern humans) are involved in speech.

During the 1970s, it was widely believed that the Neanderthals lacked modern speech capacities. It was claimed that they possessed a hyoid bone so high up in the vocal tract as to preclude the possibility of producing certain vowel sounds.

The hyoid bone is present in many mammals. It allows a wide range of tongue, pharyngeal and laryngeal movements by bracing these structures alongside each other in order to produce variation. It is now realised that its lowered position is not unique to Homo sapiens, whilst its relevance to vocal flexibility may have been overstated: although men have a lower larynx, they do not produce a wider range of sounds than women or two-year-old babies. There is no evidence that the larynx position of the Neanderthals impeded the range of vowel sounds they could produce. The discovery of a modern-looking hyoid bone of a Neanderthal man in the Kebara Cave in Israel led its discoverers to argue that the Neanderthals had a descended larynx, and thus human-like speech capabilities. However, other researchers have claimed that the morphology of the hyoid is not indicative of the larynx's position. It is necessary to take into consideration the skull base, the mandible, the cervical vertebrae and a cranial reference plane.

The morphology of the outer and middle ear of Middle Pleistocene hominins from Atapuerca, Spain, believed to be proto-Neanderthal, suggests they had an auditory sensitivity similar to modern humans and very different from chimpanzees. They were probably able to differentiate between many different speech sounds.

Hypoglossal canal

The hypoglossal nerve plays an important role in controlling movements of the tongue. In 1998, a research team used the size of the hypoglossal canal in the base of fossil skulls in an attempt to estimate the relative number of nerve fibres, claiming on this basis that Middle Pleistocene hominins and Neanderthals had more fine-tuned tongue control than either Australopithecines or apes. Subsequently, however, it was demonstrated that hypoglossal canal size and nerve sizes are not correlated, and it is now accepted that such evidence is uninformative about the timing of human speech evolution.

Distinctive features theory

According to one influential school, the human vocal apparatus is intrinsically digital on the model of a keyboard or digital computer (see below). Nothing about a chimpanzee's vocal apparatus suggests a digital keyboard, notwithstanding the anatomical and physiological similarities. This poses the question as to when and how, during the course of human evolution, the transition from analog to digital structure and function occurred.

The human supralaryngeal tract is said to be digital in the sense that it is an arrangement of moveable toggles or switches, each of which, at any one time, must be in one state or another. The vocal cords, for example, are either vibrating (producing a sound) or not vibrating (in silent mode). By virtue of simple physics, the corresponding distinctive feature – in this case, "voicing" – cannot be somewhere in between. The options are limited to "off" and "on". Equally digital is the feature known as "nasalisation". At any given moment the soft palate or velum either allows or does not allow sound to resonate in the nasal chamber. In the case of lip and tongue positions, more than two digital states may be allowed.

The theory that speech sounds are composite entities constituted by complexes of binary phonetic features was first advanced in 1938 by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. A prominent early supporter of this approach was Noam Chomsky, who went on to extend it from phonology to language more generally, in particular to the study of syntax and semantics. In his 1965 book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky treated semantic concepts as combinations of binary-digital atomic elements explicitly on the model of distinctive features theory. The lexical item "bachelor", on this basis, would be expressed as [+ Human], [+ Male], [- Married].

Supporters of this approach view the vowels and consonants recognised by speakers of a particular language or dialect at a particular time as cultural entities of little scientific interest. From a natural science standpoint, the units which matter are those common to Homo sapiens by virtue of biological nature. By combining the atomic elements or "features" with which all humans are innately equipped, anyone may in principle generate the entire range of vowels and consonants to be found in any of the world's languages, whether past, present or future. The distinctive features are in this sense atomic components of a universal language.

Criticism
In recent years, the notion of an innate "universal grammar" underlying phonological variation has been called into question. The most comprehensive monograph ever written about speech sounds, The Sounds of the World's Languages, by Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson, found virtually no basis for the postulation of some small number of fixed, discrete, universal phonetic features. Examining 305 languages, for example, they encountered vowels that were positioned basically everywhere along the articulatory and acoustic continuum. Ladefoged concluded that phonological features are not determined by human nature: "Phonological features are best regarded as artifacts that linguists have devised in order to describe linguistic systems".

Self-organisation theory

Self-organisation characterises systems where macroscopic structures are spontaneously formed out of local interactions between the many components of the system. In self-organised systems, global organisational properties are not to be found at the local level. In colloquial terms, self-organisation is roughly captured by the idea of "bottom-up" (as opposed to "top-down") organisation. Examples of self-organised systems range from ice crystals to galaxy spirals in the inorganic world.

According to many phoneticians, the sounds of language arrange and re-arrange themselves through self-organisation. Speech sounds have both perceptual (how one hears them) and articulatory (how one produces them) properties, all with continuous values. Speakers tend to minimise effort, favouring ease of articulation over clarity. Listeners do the opposite, favouring sounds that are easy to distinguish even if difficult to pronounce. Since speakers and listeners are constantly switching roles, the syllable systems actually found in the world's languages turn out to be a compromise between acoustic distinctiveness on the one hand, and articulatory ease on the other.

Agent-based computer models take the perspective of self-organisation at the level of the speech community or population. The two main paradigms are (1) the iterated learning model and (2) the language game model. Iterated learning focuses on transmission from generation to generation, typically with just one agent in each generation. In the language game model, a whole population of agents simultaneously produce, perceive and learn language, inventing novel forms when the need arises.

Several models have shown how relatively simple peer-to-peer vocal interactions, such as imitation, can spontaneously self-organise a system of sounds shared by the whole population, and different in different populations. For example, models elaborated by Berrah et al. (1996) and de Boer (2000), and recently reformulated using Bayesian theory, showed how a group of individuals playing imitation games can self-organise repertoires of vowel sounds which share substantial properties with human vowel systems. For example, in de Boer's model, initially vowels are generated randomly, but agents learn from each other as they interact repeatedly over time. Agent A chooses a vowel from her repertoire and produces it, inevitably with some noise. Agent B hears this vowel and chooses the closest equivalent from her own repertoire. To check whether this truly matches the original, B produces the vowel she thinks she has heard, whereupon A refers once again to her own repertoire to find the closest equivalent. If this matches the one she initially selected, the game is successful, otherwise, it has failed. "Through repeated interactions", according to de Boer, "vowel systems emerge that are very much like the ones found in human languages".

In a different model, the phonetician Björn Lindblom was able to predict, on self-organisational grounds, the favoured choices of vowel systems ranging from three to nine vowels on the basis of a principle of optimal perceptual differentiation.

Further models studied the role of self-organisation in the origins of phonemic coding and combinatoriality, which is the existence of phonemes and their systematic reuse to build structured syllables. Pierre-Yves Oudeyer developed models which showed that basic neural equipment for adaptive holistic vocal imitation, coupling directly motor and perceptual representations in the brain, can generate spontaneously shared combinatorial systems of vocalisations, including phonotactic patterns, in a society of babbling individuals. These models also characterised how morphological and physiological innate constraints can interact with these self-organised mechanisms to account for both the formation of statistical regularities and diversity in vocalisation systems.

Gestural theory
The gestural theory states that speech was a relatively late development, evolving by degrees from a system that was originally gestural. Human ancestors were unable to control their vocalisation at the time when gestures were used to communicate; however, as they slowly began to control their vocalisations, spoken language began to evolve.

Three types of evidence support this theory:
 Gestural language and vocal language depend on similar neural systems. The regions on the cortex that are responsible for mouth and hand movements border each other.
 Nonhuman primates minimise vocal signals in favour of manual, facial and other visible gestures in order to express simple concepts and communicative intentions in the wild. Some of these gestures resemble those of humans, such as the "begging posture", with the hands stretched out, which humans share with chimpanzees.
Mirror Neurons

Research has found strong support for the idea that spoken language and signing depend on similar neural structures. Patients who used sign language, and who suffered from a left-hemisphere lesion, showed the same disorders with their sign language as vocal patients did with their oral language. Other researchers found that the same left-hemisphere brain regions were active during sign language as during the use of vocal or written language.

Humans spontaneously use hand and facial gestures when formulating ideas to be conveyed in speech. There are also, of course, many sign languages in existence, commonly associated with deaf communities; as noted above, these are equal in complexity, sophistication, and expressive power, to any oral language. The main difference is that the "phonemes" are produced on the outside of the body, articulated with hands, body, and facial expression, rather than inside the body articulated with tongue, teeth, lips, and breathing.

Many psychologists and scientists have looked into the mirror system in the brain to answer this theory as well as other behavioural theories. Evidence to support mirror neurons as a factor in the evolution of speech includes mirror neurons in primates, the success of teaching apes to communicate gesturally, and pointing/gesturing to teach young children language. Fogassi and Ferrari (2014) monitored motor cortex activity in monkeys, specifically area F5 in the Broca's area, where mirror neurons are located. They observed changes in electrical activity in this area when the monkey executed or observed different hand actions performed by someone else. Broca's area is a region in the frontal lobe responsible for language production and processing. The discovery of mirror neurons in this region, which fire when an action is done or observed specifically with the hand, strongly supports the belief that communication was once accomplished with gestures. The same is true when teaching young children language. When one points at a specific object or location, mirror neurons in the child fire as though they were doing the action, which results in long-term learning

Criticism

Critics note that for mammals in general, sound turns out to be the best medium in which to encode information for transmission over distances at speed. Given the probability that this applied also to early humans, it is hard to see why they should have abandoned this efficient method in favour of more costly and cumbersome systems of visual gesturing – only to return to sound at a later stage.

By way of explanation, it has been proposed that at a relatively late stage in human evolution, hands became so much in demand for making and using tools that the competing demands of manual gesturing became a hindrance. The transition to spoken language is said to have occurred only at that point. Since humans throughout evolution have been making and using tools, however, most scholars remain unconvinced by this argument. (For a different approach to this issue – one setting out from considerations of signal reliability and trust – see "from pantomime to speech" below).

Timeline of speech evolution

Little is known about the timing of language's emergence in the human species. Unlike writing, speech leaves no material trace, making it archaeologically invisible. Lacking direct linguistic evidence, specialists in human origins have resorted to the study of anatomical features and genes arguably associated with speech production. Whilst such studies may provide information as to whether pre-modern Homo species had speech capacities, it is still unknown whether they actually spoke. Whilst they may have communicated vocally, the anatomical and genetic data lack the resolution necessary to differentiate proto-language from speech.

Using statistical methods to estimate the time required to achieve the current spread and diversity in modern languages today, Johanna Nichols – a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley – argued in 1998 that vocal languages must have begun diversifying at least 100,000 years ago.

In 2012, anthropologists Charles Perreault and Sarah Mathew used phonemic diversity to suggest a date consistent with this. "Phonemic diversity" denotes the number of perceptually distinct units of sound – consonants, vowels and tones – in a language. The current worldwide pattern of phonemic diversity potentially contains the statistical signal of the expansion of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa, beginning around 60-70 thousand years ago. Some scholars argue that phonemic diversity evolves slowly and can be used as a clock to calculate how long the oldest African languages would have to have been around in order to accumulate the number of phonemes they possess today. As human populations left Africa and expanded into the rest of the world, they underwent a series of bottlenecks – points at which only a very small population survived to colonise a new continent or region. Allegedly such a population crash led to a corresponding reduction in genetic, phenotypic and phonemic diversity. African languages today have some of the largest phonemic inventories in the world, whilst the smallest inventories are found in South America and Oceania, some of the last regions of the globe to be colonised. For example, Rotokas, a language of New Guinea, and Pirahã, spoken in South America, both have just 11 phonemes, whilst !Xun, a language spoken in Southern Africa has 141 phonemes.
The authors use a natural experiment – the colonization of mainland Southeast Asia on the one hand, the long-isolated Andaman Islands on the other – to estimate the rate at which phonemic diversity increases through time. Using this rate, they estimate that the world's languages date back to the Middle Stone Age in Africa, sometime between 350 thousand and 150 thousand years ago. This corresponds to the speciation event which gave rise to Homo sapiens.

These and similar studies have however been criticised by linguists who argue that they are based on a flawed analogy between genes and phonemes, since phonemes are frequently transferred laterally between languages unlike genes, and on a flawed sampling of the world's languages, since both Oceania and the Americas also contain languages with very high numbers of phonemes, and Africa contains languages with very few. They argue that the actual distribution of phonemic diversity in the world reflects recent language contact and not deep language history - since it is well demonstrated that languages can lose or gain many phonemes over very short periods. In other words, there is no valid linguistic reason to expect genetic founder effects to influence phonemic diversity.

See also

 Animal communication
 Biolinguistics
 Deception in animals
 Evolutionary anthropology
 Essay on the Origin of Languages
 Historical linguistics
 Human evolution
 Language acquisition
 Linguistic anthropology
 Linguistic universals
 Neurobiological origins of language
 Origins of society
 Origin of language
 Physical anthropology
 Proto-language
 Proto-Human language
 Recent African origin of modern humans
 Signalling theory
 Sociocultural evolution
 Symbolic culture
 Universal grammar

Notes

Further reading

 Bickerton, D. 2009. Adam's Tongue. New York: Hill and Wang.
 Botha, R. and C. Knight (eds) 2009. The Prehistory of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Botha, R. and C. Knight (eds) 2009. The Cradle of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Burling, R. 2005. The Talking Ape. How language evolved. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Christiansen, M. and S. Kirby (eds), 2003. Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Corballis, M. C., 2002. From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
 Deacon, T. W., 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton.
 de Boer. 2001. "The Origins of Vowels Systems", Oxford University Press.
 de Grolier, E. (ed.), 1983. The Origin and Evolution of Language. Paris: Harwood Academic Publishers.
 Deutscher, G. 2005. The Unfolding of Language. The evolution of mankind's greatest invention. London: Random House.
 Dor, D., C. Knight and J. Lewis (eds), 2014. The Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Dunbar, R. I. M. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber.

 Fitch, W. T. 2010. The Evolution of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Harnad, S. R., H. D. Steklis and J. Lancaster (eds), 1976. Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech. New York: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
 Hrdy,  S. B. 2009. Mothers and others. The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
 Hurford, J. R. 2007. The Origins of Meaning. Language in the light of evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 Kenneally, C. 2007. The First Word. The search for the origins of language. New York: Viking.
 Lenneberg, E. H. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley.
 Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Trans. A. Bostock Berger. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

 Logan, Robert K. 2007. "The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
 MacNeilage, P. 2008. The Origin of Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Maynard Smith, J. and D. Harper 2003. Animal Signals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Oudeyer, P-Y. (2006) "Self-Organization in the Evolution of Speech", Oxford University Press.
 Tallerman, M. and K. Gibson (eds), 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 Tomasello, M. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
 Zahavi, A. and A. Zahavi 1997. The Handicap Principle. A missing piece in Darwin's puzzle. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

External links
 Interactive sagittal section
 Design features of speech
 Evolution of speech (anatomical and neural bases).
 Ritual and the origins of language.
 Decoding Chomsky

Language

Origin of speech