Hidden labour of caregiving for persons with epilepsy in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, South Africa: a qualitative study.

Analogical communication using shared cultural repertoires results in high-fidelity social learning of complex problems. The social learning of complex cultural behaviours is what makes the human species so successful and able to operate in a huge variety of ecological niches all over the planet (Boyd et al., ). Many of these cultural behaviours and technologies are extremely complex and require active teaching and attentive learning, often accompanied by verbal and gestural communication (Heyes, ; Laland et al., ; Sterelny, ). Models and experiments of social learning in humans often assume that humans can rely on high-fidelity copying, presumably via imitation of some kind. It is typically assumed that language is either totally absent and imitation occurs by observation, or that fully fledged language is available for transmission. Rarely do we see consideration of the crucial time in our evolutionary history in which language was , during which there was a basic form of protolanguage that presumably aided communication but lacked the semantic and pragmatic flexibility of modern language (Fitch, ). This language gap is important, because high-fidelity transmission of complex information by language-free imitation is often highly error-prone (Thompson et al., ) and because complex tool use and teaching with language may have coevolved during this period of our evolutionary history (Fitch, ; Morgan et al., ). We suggest that this crucial time would have witnessed the emergent use of analogies in human communication, where an analogy is defined as the explicit mapping of the relational structures of a novel stimulus to those of a known concept or familiar stimulus for the purpose of knowledge transfer (Brand et al., ; Gentner et al., ; Hofstadter & Sander, ; Holyoak & Thagard, ; Lupyan & Winter, ). The process of communicating via already-formed labels and categories necessarily improves learning and understanding of new and complex behaviours, and helps to explain why our modern language is littered with analogy, metaphor, and story. Analogical communication is not merely a by-product that came after the development of language, but is likely to have played a key role in facilitating how we cognitively process and communicate about our environment at the most basic level (Brand et al., ; Hofstadter & Sander, ). The evolution of analogical communication need not have required specialised genetic adaptations; our hypothesis is consistent with cultural evolutionary approaches that describe processes by which the nature of language was facilitated by pre-existing adaptations for social learning, social tolerance, and cooperation (Chater & Christiansen, ; Kirby, ; Thompson et al., ; Tomasello et al., ).