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

by Daniel L. Everett

We know this through the fossil record. Icons, indexes and symbols appear in the palaeontological record before evidence for grammar, just as the progression of signs would have it.

Indexes are non-arbitrary, largely non-intentional linkages between form and meaning.

The deep knowledge of local index meanings can be referred to as ‘emic’ – or insider – knowledge.

These indexes are inseparably connected physically to individual objects or creatures and therefore they lack arbitrariness and intentionality – two crucial components of symbolic language.

It is preceded by intentionality. (Languages do have indexes where intentionality and arbitrariness have been added, going beyond the most primitive indexes shared by most species. These are words like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘this’ and so on.)

Intentionality is the property of being mentally directed towards or about something and requires a mental operation or ‘stance’ of attention directed towards something.

Makapansgat pebble or the Erfoud manuport or the Venus of Berekhat Ram,

After all, modern day emojis are able to act as a kind of icon-based language. However, emojis depend on the modern grammars from which they emerge for complexity of interpretation and their organisation.

the symbol. By being both intentional and arbitrary, the symbol represents a much longer stride towards modern language than either the index or the icon (although both are still found in all languages).

Icons can shape languages in ways beyond mere images or onomatopoeia, however. There are areas in which iconic sound representations are non-arbitrary, culturally significant components of human languages. These suggest that icons played a role in the transition to symbols that was so crucial to the invention of language. An example from the language spoken by the isolated Pirahã people indigenous to Amazonas in Brazil, which involves differences between men’s speech and women’s speech, helps to illustrate this.

Thus size is not part of the interpretant of ‘eye’, though the directional orientation of the letters is. From this, it is seen that the symbol is itself analysed into meaningful parts that produce the interpretant.¶ Peirce was right again.

It is biology that underlies human language abilities. Acknowledging this obvious fact, it is perhaps surprising and counterintuitive to some to discover that there is nothing in the body dedicated to language. Not a single organ. Nothing in the brain. And nothing in the mouth (except for the position of the tongue).

This tells us that language is not a biological object but a semiotic one. It did not originate from a gene but from culture.

The single unique aspect of the human vocal apparatus that does seem to have evolved specifically for human speech, again, is its shape, caused by the position and form of the tongue (to which we return in detail later).

Sign languages, like spoken/oral-aural languages, also show evidence for syllable-like groupings of gestures. This means that humans are predisposed to such groupings, in the sense that our minds quickly latch on to syllabic groupings as ways of more efficient processing.

Makapansgat manuport

Move forward to 300,000 years ago and another manuport appears, this one in what is modern-day Morocco, picked up by Homo erectus, a cuttlefish bone shaped like a phallus

If language is nothing more than a computational system, a set of structures embellished by local words, then clearly a phallic cuttlefish bone fails to move humans any closer to such a system. On the other hand, if language is about meaning and symbols, in which computation is nothing more than an aid to communication, then icons become vital to the reconstruction of the evolution of language.

example the 300–400,000-year-old Schöningen spears (Figure 11) are evidence of culture among Homo heidelbergensis, perhaps a form of Homo erectus, and show that these humans hunted, that they used brute force rather than throwing and that they dedicated planning to hunting. Thus the spears represent cultural objectives, cultural knowledge, and cultural techniques. To members of the cultures that use them, they are therefore symbolic of these things, especially in light of the wider body of evidence for erectus culture.

Because tools are symbols, they also manifest a property most theoreticians consider crucial for language known as ‘displacement’. This term refers to the sense of meaning that occurs when the object or referent evoked is not present, such as a song your mother enjoyed that reminds you of her when your mother is no longer around.

A spear means ‘hunting’, even when the spear is not actually being used for hunting.

Consider now one of the famous Schöningen spears. For their original owners these would have elicited thoughts of, thus symbolised, hunting, of bravery, of caring for their families and of death. Some of these spears were for thrusting, not for throwing.

tools as symbols comes from erectus shell carvings on Java

Fascinatingly, they were made some 540,000 years ago.

They were used from roughly 2.6 million years ago. Such tools, whose uses included chopping, scraping and pounding, were probably invented by Homo habilis (if one accepts this name as a separate, non-erectus species within the genus Homo), or possibly by australopithecines, but the tools at the Olduvai Gorge were clearly transported and manufactured by erectus.

The manufacture of tools requires planning, imagination (having an image of what the final tools should look like) and, at least eventually, communication of some sort for instructing others in how to make tools.

The sequential operations call upon the prefrontal cortex and produce cultural selectional pressure for more cortical horsepower, more smarts. However, this pressure might have worked, the larger prefrontal cortex of earlier Homo toolmakers, relative to australopithecines, may be a response to it.

But this is not a necessary inference. Cultural conservatism is a powerful and common force. It is always easier to imitate than to innovate, especially if a culture discourages innovation, as is still common throughout the world.

The lag might have resulted from a lack of cognitive or linguistic development. But it might also result from the nearly universal principle of ‘satisficing’, in other words, nature tends to be satisfied with ‘good enough’, not striving for the best.

religious conservatism. It is indeed a surprisingly long time. But this ‘innovation gap’ does not wear its explanation on its sleeve. And in light of all other evidence, it does not alter the hypothesis that Homo erectus invented language.

The jump from index or icon to symbol is a relative baby step in conceptual development, though huge in language evolution.

gene (the oft-cited FOXP2 gene is certainly not one, though it is sometimes claimed to be so),

in spite of the focus of many linguists on grammar as synonymous with language, grammar itself is no more important than any other component of language.

There are several reasons to reject the idea that grammar is central to language. First, languages like Pirahã and Riau (Indonesia) are languages currently spoken that appear to lack any hierarchical grammar.

history.

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What did Homo erectus invent, then? Symbols. And symbols are just a short hop away from language.

The evidence thus strongly supports the claim that Homo erectus possessed language: evidence of culture – values, knowledge structures and social organisation; tool use and improvement

there could have been Homo sapiens without language 50,000 years ago, the hypothesised time of the ‘Merge leap’ for Berwick and Chomsky, that is more or less when the ability to do recursion entered human brains and languages, then there is no reason that there still could not be pockets of humans without language, that is without recursive thought or expression. This seems like a strange prediction, but it should be easy enough to verify. Finding humans that not only lack but who are completely unable to understand or produce recursive language would be striking support for the UG/recursion theory of language origins.

The hominin brain grew and developed for over 7 million years, from Sahelanthropus tchadensis to Homo sapiens, about 200,000 years ago. Then the growth and development seems to have stopped. There has been no clear evidence for evolution in Homo brain size since sapiens first left Africa. If Homo sapiens were smarter than Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis 200 millennia ago, why are humans no smarter today than those sapiens that first left Africa as the evidence suggests?

200,000 years is a short period of time in the sweep of evolutionary history. On the other hand, according to some theories Homo neanderthalensis emerged from Homo heidelbergensis in only 100,000 years.

This apparent halt in human brain development is nothing to be ashamed of. It seems to be caused by the simple fact that life is good for our species.

Language, as we have been seeing, is not that difficult, in spite of a long tradition going back to the 1950s telling us that it is extremely complicated, a veritable mystery. What we have seen, to the contrary, is that language is symbols and ordering at its core and that those are not tough ingredients to develop for brains like ours.

Hominin brains’ next evolutionary jump occurs about 1.9 million years ago with the appearance of Homo erectus.

In stage three, Holloway’s final stage that occurred about 500,000 years ago, the brain had reached its maximal size and refinement in specialisation for each hemisphere.

Homo erectus arrived on the scene with brain asymmetries typical of modern humans, such as a well-developed Broca’s region. This implies the existence of, or at least the possibility for, some form of language.

Now, it is important to avoid giving the wrong impression. Erectus was not the equal of Homo sapiens. In fact, compared to sapiens they had many, many shortcomings. It is important to discuss a few of the ways erectus, for all their relative brilliance, were inferior to sapiens.

Erectus speech perhaps sounded more garbled relative to that of sapiens, making it harder to hear

Part of the reason for erectus’s probably mushy speech is that they lacked a modern hyoid (Greek for ‘U-shaped’) bone, the small bone in the pharynx that anchors the larynx.

had not yet taken on the shape of sapiens’ and neanderthalensis’ hyoids (these two being virtually identical).

FOXP2 gives greater speech control. Possessing a more primitive FOXP2 gene, erectus would have had less laryngeal and therefore less emotional control in their speech.