[shrimpx]

To push back a bit against our being naturally social, ancestral primates were solitary foragers with no natural tendency toward socializing. And even later when we became social hunter gatherers, I venture to imagine it was common to lose your group and become alone, due to the small number of people and dangers abound. Insisting that we’re naturally social is probably more far fetched than admitting it’s fairly normal to become alone.

[slothtrop]

Notwithstanding I'm skeptical of your claim, being "naturally social" is the entire reason language has evolved. A (very) distant ancestor's nature has no claim on your nature.

[shrimpx]

I agree we’re social, I just don’t entirely agree it’s unnatural to be solitary.

That ancestor probably has some tiny amount of bearing, though possibly negligible.

Language doesn’t prove the absence of natural solitude. It just shows we’ve been “pretty social” for a while.

[oblio]

> Language doesn’t prove the absence of natural solitude. It just shows we’ve been “pretty social” for a while.

For modern humans it does.

You can't dedicate a huge percentage of your brain to speech and communication in general, and allocate a sizeable percentage of your total energy usage (!) to them, and still be meant to be a solitary species.

[slothtrop]

Talking about absolute states. Our being social beings doesn't preclude also experiencing solitude or having more or less tendency towards introversion. A solitary nature in this case has a meaning that we also ascribe to certain animals wholesale, because it describes a biologically driven behavior that can't be said of humans.

[crthpl]

Or perhaps the other way around: we are social because we have language.

[slothtrop]

You think language would spontaneously evolve without a disposition to socialize a-priori? That doesn't make any sense.

[shrimpx]

Presumably we needed to “notice” an orange in a tree before we could point to it. Before you could communicate with signs, you could probably realize something equivalent to “that’s food”, despite not having language yet.