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

by Daniel L. Everett

Animals and fossils strongly support the idea that humans got their unique abilities by baby steps. And our debt for this knowledge goes back to the fossil hunters.

Originating sometime in the early 1960s and first published in a paper by Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl, the molecular clock idea came about after noticing that changes in amino acids across species are temporally constant. Thus, knowing the differences in amino acids between two species can tell when these species split from a constant ancestor.

Nature. Kimura’s paper laid out the basic ideas of a ‘neutral theory of molecular evolution’. The neutral theory here is non-Darwinian, meaning that, rather than natural selection, Kimura placed the responsibility for most evolutionary change on genetic drift produced by random, neutral variations in organisms. Since these changes do not affect the survivability of an organism, it is able to pass on its genes normally to viable and fertile offspring.

THE GREATEST HUNTER. The greatest communicator. The most intrepid traveller. Perhaps the greatest distance runner on earth, Homo erectus was the unsurpassed marvel of its time.

‘I am aware of x’ but also ‘I am aware that I am aware of x’. This is ‘conscious consciousness’ and it would have facilitated their travel as well as their thinking about the symbols that were already emerging from the growing complexity of their cultures.

Erectus would have been the first creature in history to be self-conscious. And the first to imagine. (Imagination is the knowing consideration of ‘what is not but could be’.)

They had crossed the communication-language threshold.

stone to open a shellfish – even if their offspring learn to use these from them – this does not mean that they possess culture. They are using (perhaps even transmitting) tools in the absence of culture. Impressive as tool use is, culture goes beyond this by contextualising artefacts.

Pair-bonding is inferred not only from the archaeological record of erectus villages but also from smaller erectus canine teeth and reduced sexual dimorphism between males and females. Pair-bonding plus tools is evidence for family units and cooperation.

At this site, going back at least 790,000 years, there is evidence for Acheulean tools, Levallois tools, evidence of controlled fire, organised village life, huts that housed socially specialised tasks of different kinds and other evidence of culture among Homo erectus.

They built villages that manifested what almost appears to be

as in Gesher Benot Ya’aqov.

erectus seems to have deliberately travelled to geologically unstable areas. Erectus followed a route known as the Plio-Pleistocene Tethys (the former coasts of an even more ancient ocean),

and there have been many – was the discovery of Acheulean tools on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. This find was preceded somewhat by a discovery in 1957 by Theodor Verhoeven, a Dutch archaeologist and missionary, of bones of Stegodontidae, an extinct family of Proboscidea (relatives of mastodons, mammoths and elephants), on the same island.

Elephants have been observed to swim for as long as forty-eight hours, in a herd, across African lakes. They are known to have swum as far as thirty miles (forty-eight kilometres) at sea (which is further than the distance to Flores would have been 750,000 years ago).

But the tools later discovered near charred bones of these creatures do present an enigma. How did they get there? These tools are nearly 800,000 years old. And there is no period during which the island was connected to any other land. It has always been isolated by deep water. Erectus somehow got to Flores. How?

that Homo erectus built watercraft and crossed the sea at various times in the lower Palaeolithic era, around 800,000 years ago (and three-quarters of a million years before Homo sapiens made sea crossings).

Culture entails symbolic reasoning and projecting meaning on to the world, meaning that is not about things as they are, but as they are interpreted, used and perceived by members of the community that uses them. Culture transforms ‘things’ into symbols and meaning. And if erectus had symbols, it had language.

As recently as 2008, Russian researchers found very primitive stone tools on the isolated island of Socotra, more than 150 miles

The answer seems to be something like what I refer to as a ‘G1 language’. This is a language in which symbols (words or gestures) are ordered in a conventional way when spoken (such as subject-verb-object, as in ‘John saw Mary’), although, somewhat contradictorily, the interpretation of the symbols in this agreed-upon order can be very loose.

Culture serves as a filter on what the meaning is.

Grammar is another partial filter. So in this case, ‘Mary hit John’ might mean that Mary hit or bumped into John, but it would be harder for it to mean that John bumped into Mary because of the word order imposed by the grammar, which acts as a (weak) filter on the possible meanings of the sentence. Whenever the grammatical filter is less fine-meshed, as in a G1 language, the role of culture in aiding the meaning becomes even greater,

The cultural evidence is otherwise inexplicable. Erectus were seafarers and manufacturers not only of technologically interesting hand tools, from Lower Palaeolithic Olduwan tools to Upper Palaeolithic Mousterian tools, but also vessels able to cross large bodies of water. Erectus communities, such as the one Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, developed cultural specialisation of tasks. And erectus controlled fire, as evidence from several erectus sites suggests.

Simple (G1) languages emerged with grammar, which, accompanied by pitch modulation and gestures, produced the most effective communication system the world had ever seen. This is the minimum form of language possible.

A protolanguage by definition is not a fully developed human language, but rather merely a ‘good enough’ system for very rudimentary communication.

What Fuentes means by this is that researchers should not talk about the evolution of individual traits of species, such as human language, but instead that they need to understand the evolution of entire creatures, their behaviours, physiology and psychology, their niches, as well as their interaction with other species.

Nowadays, a very different theory of the origin of language than what I am urging here is popular among some. This is the idea that language is a disembodied object, along the lines of a mathematical formula. In this view, language is little more than a particular kind of grammar. If that kind of grammar, a hierarchical recursive grammar, is not found in a communication system, then that form of communication is not a language.

Proponents of this idea also maintain that grammar ‘popped’ into being some 50–65,000 years ago via a mutation.

theory comes from the work of Noam Chomsky, who began publishing in the late fifties and is, according to some, now the leading linguist in the world. But Chomsky’s view that language is a recursive grammar, nothing more nor less, is a highly peculiar one. Already in 1972, a review in the New York Review of Books by American philosopher John Searle noted how strange Chomsky’s conception of language actually is.

In order to get down to the nuts and bolts of how language itself actually evolved, there are two alternative views of development that must be distinguished. These are uniformitarianism vs catastrophism.

In the case of language evolution, there are good reasons to reject catastrophism-based views such as Chomsky’s.

Moreover, this catastrophism view fails to account for the fact that mutations for language are superfluous because language evolution can be explained without them.

It could not merely be that ‘language or grammar made thought clearer’. That is in all likelihood correct, but it doesn’t speak to how or when language or grammar came into being. Nor does it offer any details on how it spread, either genetically or culturally. Otherwise, bandying about the word ‘mutation’ is unwarranted and speculative. This is the major weakness of the saltationist or what one might refer to as the ‘X-Men’ theory of language origin. Moreover, such a conjecture is unnecessary. Good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection offers a more scientifically grounded story.

But such evidence does exist in the record of the erectus cognitive explosion marked by their migration from Africa.

what Homo erectus languages might have been like – namely symbols ordered according to cultural conventions. In this kind of case symbols follow an order agreed upon by members of a particular society. For example, Americans and Britons prefer to say ‘red, white and blue’ rather than ‘white, red and blue’ when discussing their national flags. Symbols and ordering can sometimes be vague and ambiguous, and therefore erectus would have needed the ability to use context and culture to interpret fully what others said.

aside from the few cultures that make ceramics, such as the famous Marajoara culture discovered on the Switzerland-sized delta at the mouth of the Amazon. It would be nearly impossible to find direct evidence that they had language – just as is the case for many ancient hunter-gatherer groups. We are also unable to prove that the Homo sapiens who originally left Africa, or neanderthalensis, or Denisovans, or erectus had language, though it would be astounding if they did not, based on the cultural evidence. Therefore, one must be careful not to conclude that earlier

In the absence of evidence, the simplest idea about language evolution is that language gradually appeared via natural, incremental processes, following the invention of symbols, which in turn were made possible by the gradual evolution of the human brain and culture.

quotidian

Tools may not be symbols for chimps, but they would have been symbols for erectus.

More intricate syntactic structures of the kind found in many modern languages, such as subordinate clauses, complex noun phrases, word-compounding and others, are not crucial for language and are later additions made for cultural reasons.

Communication is, after all, pervasive in the animal kingdom. Humans are simply the best communicators, not the only ones.

First of all, there are studies from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT that explain why ambiguity is to be expected in a communication system.

Another issue to note is that it is by no means clear that all people always or even most of the time think in language. Many people, such as biologist Frans de Waal and author Temple Grandlin, claim that they think in pictures, not in words.

Moreover, seeing communication as the primary purpose of language facilitates the understanding of what is most interesting about language – its social applications. Thus, for many researchers, in the study of language grammar takes a back seat to things like conversational interactional patterns,

Structure guides the interpretation of the words and, over time, it more finely hones their meanings, bringing about nouns, verbs, prepositions and modifiers.

To proponents of the Grammar Came First hypothesis, hierarchical structure is the most important aspect of human language. And, again, many who adopt this hypothesis believe that language appeared suddenly, as recently as 50,000 years ago.

Information-rich communication, especially when coming at high rates of speed typical of human languages, will be aided, just as Simon predicted, by being structured in particular ways.

The reason is that the first set lacks recursion – sentences are all independent, side-by-side, but the second set does have recursion – one sentence inside another. It is a fact that, because of the complexity of the multiple quotes, recursion helps us to process the sentences more effectively.

An example of a functional pressure is the fact that in most languages, prepositions with less semantic content are shorter than prepositions with more content, as in the contrast between, say, ‘to’ or ‘at’ vs ‘about’ or ‘beyond’. An example of efficiency in information transfer is seen in the fact that less frequent words are more predictable in their shape than those speakers use more frequently.

So the verb ‘bequeath’, as a less-frequent verb, has a simple conjugation: ‘I bequeath’, ‘you bequeath’, ‘she bequeaths’, ‘we bequeath’ and ‘everyone bequeaths’ (this general principle is known as Zipf’s Law). But the common verb ‘to be’, is irregular, as in ‘I am’, ‘you are’, ‘he is’, ‘we are’ and ‘they are’. Both functional pressure and information transfer requirements optimise language for better communication.