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Abstract:
Observations of alarm calling behavior in putty-nosed monkeys are suggestive of a link with human language evolution. However, as is often the case in studies of animal behavior and cognition, competing
theories are underdetermined by the available data. We argue that computational modeling,
and in particular the use of individual-based simulations, is an effective way to reduce the size of the
pool of candidate explanations. Simulation achieves this both through the classification of evolutionary
trajectories as either plausible or implausible, and by putting lower bounds on the cognitive complexity
required to perform particular behaviors. A case is made for using both of these strategies to
understand the extent to which the alarm calls of putty-nosed monkeys are likely to be a good model
for human language evolution.
