Temple Grandin’s latest book Animals in Translation has a couple of ideas that deserve some wider discussion. (The book as a whole is disappointing – see my reviews on Amazon for some of my complaints).
She reports that Con Slobodchikoff has shown that prairie dogs have a language that includes nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and they can apparently combine words to describe objects they haven’t seen before. This seems sufficiently inconsistent with what I’ve read about nonhuman languages (e.g. in Pinker’s books) that it deserves more attention than it has gotten. I can’t find enough about it on the web to decide whether to believe it, and it will take some time for me to get a paper version of Slobodchikoff’s descriptions of the research.
Grandin has an interesting idea about the coevolution of man and dogs. Domestication of animals causes their brains to become smaller, presumably because they come to rely on humans for some functions that they previously needed to handle themselves. It seems that human midbrains shrank about 10% around 10,000 years ago, about when dogs may have become domesticated. That is what we would expect if humans came to rely on dogs for many smelling tasks.