  It's worth noting, however, that linguistic nativism is just one  possibility for how Nature got language up and running. Just as it  may be that a language faculty embodying knowledge of UG was somehow  encoded in the human genome, it's also possible that that our ability to learn a language is based on a congeries of pre-existing  competences, none of which is (or was initially — see below)  specialized for language learning. Tomasello's theory of language  acquisition, discussed above (§2.2.1.b), invites this  alternative evolutionary perspective. On his view, the fundamental  skills with which linguistic competence is acquired are skills that  originally served, and still continue to serve, quite different,  non-linguistic functions. For example, he argues that children's  early word and phrase learning rest in part on their ability to share attention with others, to discern others' communicative intentions,  and to imitate aspects of their behavior. There is reason to think  that these abilities evolved independently of language, at least  initially: imitation learning enabled the fast and high-fidelity  transfer of learned skills between generations (see Tomasello 1999,  2000) and the ability to form beliefs about the mental states of  others (‘mind-reading’ or ‘theory of mind’)  enabled highly intelligent animals, such as our hominid ancestors, to negotiate a complex social environment made up of similarly  intelligent conspecifics. (See, e.g., Sterelny 2003.) On this sort  of view, the ability to learn language piggy-backed on other  capacities, which originally evolved for other reasons and which  continue to serve other functions in addition to their linguistic  ones.