AtriumCarceris
Banned
I would be cautious when citing a science fiction author's interpretation. I could just as easily cite Baxter to suggest that Neanderthals couldn't have modern human languange because in his "Evolution" novel, true syntactic language didn'r arise until long after the Neanderthals were extinct as a separate species/subspecies.
I wouldn't mind such a thing...back in 2002. But as research has progressed, it looks like Sawyer got things more right than Baxter did.
That in fact actually conforms fairly well to some current theories that hold that true human consciousness (including the capacity for art, music, syntactical grammar, etc) was a fairly recent innovation/mutation - perhaps less than 40-50,000 years ago.
Sawyer did take this into account, doncha know?