How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention

by Daniel L. Everett

deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn.

As far back as the work of psychologist Kurt Goldstein in the early twentieth century, researchers have denied that there are language-exclusive cognitive disorders. The absence of such disorders would seem to suggest that language emerges from the individual and not merely from language-specific regions of the brain.

My research suggests that language began with Homo erectus more than one million years ago, and has existed for 60,000 generations.

Around three-quarters of a million years before Homo erectus transmogrified into Homo sapiens, their communities sailed almost two hundred miles (320 kilometres) across open ocean and walked nearly the entire world.

Of course, as generations came and went, Homo sapiens unsurprisingly improved on what erectus had done, but there are languages still spoken today that are reminiscent of the first ever spoken, and they are not inferior to other modern languages.

We are almost certainly the smartest. But we are not the only smart humans who ever lived.

And there is no mental template for grammar that humans are born with. Languages’ similarities are not rooted in a special genetics for language. They follow from culture and common information-processing solutions and have their own individual evolutionary stories.

As a result, language – not communication – is the dividing line between humans and other animals.

Language did not begin with gestures, nor with singing, nor with imitations of animal sounds. Languages began via culturally invented symbols. Humans ordered these initial symbols and formed larger symbols from them.

No single one of these components was part of language until they all were – the whole giving purpose to the parts – as far back as nearly two million years ago.

They are also crucial to understanding the nature of language because of their ‘underdeterminacy’ – saying less than what is intended to be communicated and leaving the unspoken assumptions to be figured out by the hearer in some way. Underdeterminacy has always been part of language.

Sabatão and Bidu are two of the eighty or so remaining speakers of Banawá, a language that has already helped the scientific community learn a great deal about human language, cognition, the Amazon and culture.

Based on the evidence of Homo erectus culture, such as their tools, houses, village spatial organisation and ocean travel to imagined lands beyond the horizon, the genus Homo has been talking for some 60,000 generations – quite possibly more than one and a half million years.

Underdeterminacy means that every utterance in every conversation and every line in every novel and each sentence of any speech contains ‘blank spots’ – unspoken, assumed knowledge, values, roles and emotions – underdetermined content that I label ‘dark matter’.

To avoid getting caught up in a morass of uncertain proposals, only three language-possessing species need to be discussed – Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. Few linguists claim that Homo erectus had language. Many, in fact, deny this.

One proposal I discard is arguably the most influential explanation of the origin of human language of all time. This is the idea that language resulted from a single genetic mutation some 50–100,000 years ago. This mutation supposedly enabled Homo sapiens to build complex sentences.

But a very different hypothesis emerges from a careful examination of the evidence for the biological and cultural evolution of our species, namely the sign progression theory of language origin.

animal) to icons (things that physically resemble the things they are used to represent, such as a portrait for the real person) and finally by creating symbols (conventional ways of representing meaning that are largely arbitrary).

So in 1866 the Paris Linguistics Society declared that it would no longer accept papers about language origins.

‘language gap’. There is a wide and deep linguistic chasm between humans and all other species. Communication systems of the animal kingdom are unlike human language. Only human languages have symbols and only human languages are significantly compositional, breaking down utterances into smaller meaningful

The evidence shows that there was no ‘sudden leap’ to the uniquely human features of language, but that our predecessor species in the genus Homo and earlier, perhaps among the australopithecines, slowly but surely progressed until humans achieved language.

Human language thus begins humbly, as a communication system among early hominids not unlike the communication systems of many other animals, but more effective than a rattlesnake’s.

Is a vocal apparatus identical to that of modern humans necessary for human languages? No.

Scientific choices are intellectually, culturally and psychologically motivated.

This success has much to do with the fact that, though sapiens are small with soft skin, no claws or serious strength, they talk to each other. Because humans can talk they can plan, they can share knowledge, they can even leave knowledge for future generations. And therein lies the human advantage over all other terrestrial species.

Language is a gestalt – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood merely by examining its individual components.

Grammar is a tremendous aid to language and also helps in thinking. But it really is at best only a small part of any language, and its importance varies from one language to another. There are tongues that have very little grammar and others in which it is extremely complex.

Signs and symbols are explained in reference to a theory of ‘semiotics’ in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. C. S. Peirce was perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher in history.

Peirce’s theory indirectly predicts a progression of signs from natural signs (indexes), to icons, to human-created symbols.*

An index, as the most primitive part of the progression, is a form that manifests an actual physical link to what it refers to. The footprint of a cat is an index: it indicates, makes us expect to see, a cat.

An icon is something that physically evokes what it refers to: a sculpture or portrait references its subject via a physical resemblance. An onomatopoeic word like ‘bam’ or ‘clang’ brings to mind those sounds.

Symbols are the original social contract.

This is highly speculative,

All animals communicate, hence the arrow at Animal Kingdom. Not

all animals have language, which only seems to emerge through the evolution of the genus Homo.

Culture is one reason that different scientists take different views on the fossil evidence. It is not merely disagreement about the facts, though that too is important. Richard Feynman was one of the first to notice that results of physics experiments tended to be closer to published expectations than one would have otherwise expected. This points to one cultural effect in science known as ‘confirmation bias’.

Humans are counted among the haplorhini or ‘dry-nosed’ monkeys.

All monkeys native to the New World have nostrils that point sidewards, while all Old World primates, including humans, have nostrils that point downwards.

Recursion,

In other words, there could never be a gene for recursive syntax, because what is needed is a gene for recursive thinking across cognitive tasks. Recursion is a property of thought, not language per se.

chimpanzees share 96 per cent or so of their DNA sequences, closer than any other two primates, it then follows that there was a common ancestor of humans and chimps unshared by other great apes. Further work leads to the conclusion that this common ancestor split off from other great apes about 7 million years ago. Humans are thus one of the newer apes. From this lineage it is clear that all humans originated, as Darwin predicted, from Africa.

When males and females become more similar in size, this correlates, among primates, with pair-bonding, or monogamy.

Humans can see further than other primates, and most other creatures, which enables them to run faster towards a visible goal.

‘persistence hunting’,

Homo erectus learned to control fire as long as one million years ago.

This may not be saying much. After all, our intelligence is the reason we murder one another and fight wars. Our brains are a mixed blessing. Jellyfish get along quite nicely without brains.

‘the ability to attribute mental states, such as beliefs, intentions and perceptual experiences, to others by the decidedly mundane and indirect means of observing their behaviours within environmental contexts’.4 An example of this might be to see a man with two bags of groceries standing outside the entrance to a house feeling around with his free hand in his pockets. A person with a knowledge of locks and keys and the custom of locking one’s house should be able to guess that the person is searching for his keys and that he plans to unlock and then enter the house. Even for this seemingly simple scenario, there is a huge amount of cultural knowledge being drawn from. Amazonians who lack locks and keys might not have a clue as to what the man has his hands in his pockets for.

In Descartes’s view, non-humans possess no consciousness, no thought and no feelings. Additionally, his view that human minds are disconnected from bodily experience led instinctively to his linguistic-based theory of cognition, namely that only language users think.

The main problem with disregarding animal cognition is that, in doing so, we are essentially disregarding what cognition might have been like among our ancestors before they got language. Their prelinguistic state was the cognitive foundation that language emerged from.

the grammatical core of language ‘popped’ into being via a mutation, bringing forth a linguistic Prometheus whose X-Men genes spread quickly throughout the entire species.