Research on the origin of language has long been trapped in the "Second Threshold" puzzle: existing theories fail to fully explain the qualitative leap from "referring to physical objects" to "employing symbols to represent other symbols". This paper proposes that the breakthrough of the Second Threshold was neither a natural byproduct of improved communication efficiency nor a mere outcome of social collaboration, but driven by the emergence of primordial cosmic science. When early humans first gazed at the starry sky and raised ontological "why" questions, an intrinsic impulse to explore being took shape. Yet transforming this individual contemplative impulse into a shareable, transmissible symbolic system demanded a public sphere for social encoding and collective negotiation. The formation of such a shared symbolic domain constitutes the core dividing line between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Through cross-species comparative analysis of cetaceans, corvids, elephants, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, combined with archaeological evidence including Upper Paleolithic deep cave rituals, notch tally systems, symbolic artifacts and long-distance raw material exchange networks, this paper draws a core conclusion: human language’s uniqueness lies not in its intricate structural grammar, but in its function to pose ontological "why" questions, together with the social encoding of such questioning into a public symbolic framework. The study further argues that crossing the Second Threshold was not a linear cognitive upgrade but a cognitive capping effect. After Homo sapiens broke through this threshold, humanity’s fundamental cognitive dimension entered a locked steady state. All subsequent civilizational advances stem from knowledge accumulation and paradigm iteration, rather than qualitative leaps in innate cognitive capacity. This linguistic evolutionary feature directly manifests the steady-state phase of the Noetic Field in the Late Pleistocene, as proposed in PFUSRC-42.
Zhenmin Wang (Fri,) studied this question.