Annotated bibliography how we came to be humans

Tattersall, I. (December 2001). How We Came to be Human. Copyright Scientific American Inc , 56-63.

Tattersall (2001), explains the cognitive development of the human being and the way he acquireslanguage. The author make a relation between 3 concepts: exaptation, evolution and adaptation.
Exaptation is a genetic shift which produces a change in the function of a feature. This means thatexaptation does not create a new characteristic in the being, it just acts in those features already present by changing their original function for a new one. The author uses the bird´s feathers as anexample. At the beginning, they were used as isolators. The feathers were there, but after a millions of years, birds started to use them as a instrument to fly.
In the moment when the being starts touse the feature with its new function, we are in presence of evolution. The function of the feature change, the being use this new function and then starts the evolution.
When the entire specieacquire this new function and they begin to use it, we can talk about adaptation.
Exaptation
The author doesn’t explain with more details the concept of exaptation. It is hard to understand the relationbetween these three concepts at the first reading. At the beginning it’s easy to understand that exaptation and adaptation are two different theories without any kind of relation between them.Wilson, P. (2004). Hieroglyphs, A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Oxford, England.

The author (2004) attempted to explain the way the Egyptians developed their writing and theircommunication. Their firsts writing records were found in the many monuments and objects they left behind. This writing is known as hieroglyphs. It was a “pictorial sign system” (1) that they used torecord the major aspects of their culture, those things the Egyptians thought were really important.

Something that is crucial in the writing process in Egypt is the existence of the River Nile. This...