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

by Daniel L. Everett

FOXP2 also elongates neurons and makes cognition faster and more effective. Without this erectus would certainly have been ‘duller’ than modern humans.

It is probable that erectus was a dull, non-inventive creature compared to modern humans. That doesn’t mean that it was a languageless creature.

And there is another thing. The only way natural selection can make people smarter is if more intelligent people have more offspring that live. But culture changes everything. Across the globe, cultures care for their members more effectively than at any time in human history. Cultural welfare has come to vie with physical evolutionary pressures

Surprisingly, what emerges from such study is that there is little evidence that human brains have genetically specialised tissue for language. This perhaps startling assertion is supported by the fact that there is no convincing evidence to date that there are specifically heritable linguistic deficits. Language deficits are rooted in other physical or mental problems.

mentioned earlier, the brain is not a computer. It is important to underscore this again in the present context because it is a core belief for many linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists. The desire to see the brain as a machine goes all the way back to Galileo’s analogy of the universe as a clock.

appeal of this analogy is obvious, since both a computer and a brain handle information. But conceiving of a biological organ, whether a brain or a heart, as a computer, is an impediment to understanding either.

As Aristotle put it, paraphrased by Aquinas, ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu’ – nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.

Baldwin effect, refers to the discovery that culture indirectly affects the genotype

why. It is known that the brain grew from the time of Australopithecus from approximately 500cm3 to nearly 1,300cm3 in a relatively short space of 125,000 generations, or 3 million years.

Another was, ‘How did they survive so long in co-existence with Homo sapiens?’ Apparently, the Hobbit had lived until as recently as 18,000 years ago, perhaps even as recently as 14,000 years ago.

Summarising to this point, the archaeological record supports the thesis that general intelligence underwrites language, not some hypothesised language-specific, innate portion of the brain. And no innate language-dedicated areas of the brain have been found.

Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, claims that the main force driving hominins to develop greater intelligence was increased social complexity.

But the causality seems more likely to go Dunbar’s way: social size → brain size, rather than brain size → social size. If one had a larger brain first, before social change, then one might have preferred to become a hermit.

routines, along with others like skiing, bicycle-riding, typing and so on, since habits and routines are the purview of the basal ganglia.

The brain is built for learning. It is always best to consider learning as the reason for any information found in any part of the brain, at least before

It is, of course, possible that there are concepts inborn in humans. But this is a problematic idea. To implant information innately in the brain the human genotype would need to come prespecified as responsible for different concepts, actual propositional knowledge.

The mutation proponents also claim that no other species past or present, such as Homo erectus, could have had language. This is because such researchers claim that there is no evidence for symbolic representations among Homo erectus or, probably, even Homo neanderthalensis.

This is a doubly erroneous idea. The two problems with it are clear enough. First, erectus did have symbolic representations – tools, status symbols

But there is no reason that language could not reach back even further. Like sapiens, neanderthalensis were beaten to the invention of language by their ancestors, Homo erectus.

This particular research begins by assuming the narrow view that language is a grammar with recursion. No communication system lacking this property can be a language, according to this perspective.

‘Merge’ as the basis for all human language. Merge is simply an operation that combines two objects to form a larger object. Assume that one wishes to utter or interpret the phrase, ‘the big boy’. This phrase is not formed by simply placing the words ‘the’, ‘big’ and ‘boy’ together. In the Merge theory of grammar one takes ‘big’ then combines that with the word ‘boy’. Then ‘big boy’ is combined with ‘the’. As it is designed, the rule of Merge cannot work with more than two words or phrases at a time. This means that it, and therefore all of language is, a ‘binary’ procedure. This is a conception of language as structure, rather than as meaning and interaction.

Merge is therefore not a prerequisite for human language. Moreover, even if it were, Merge is not specific to language. It is an example of the well-known process of associative learning, of the type that made Pavlov’s dog famous. Pavlov’s pooch learned to associate a ringing bell with food. The bell was rung just as the food was served. Eventually the dog ‘merged’ these two concepts, bell and food, and would salivate at the sound of a bell.

nonhuman primates to master language within a framework built around the Chomsky’s [sic] hierarchy of grammars is a conceptual dead-end.

Adding to the scepticism about Fitch and Hauser’s results, Professor Mark Liberman offered his own response, on the widely read blog Language Log, concluding that Fitch and Hauser’s findings were in all likelihood about memory, not grammar per se.

What this scepticism shows is that the popular idea that human brains are hardwired for language is not confirmed by science, even though it is often claimed.

At an MIT conference on 11 September 1956, remembered for a series of brilliant lectures that some refer to now as the ‘cognitive revolution’, psychologist George A. Miller, then of Bell Laboratories, later of Princeton, presented a paper entitled ‘The Magical Number 7 +/− 2’. Miller’s research concluded that, without practice, people can remember up to nine, usually more like five, items at a time for roughly a minute.

but that they could easily remember it if it were ‘chunked’, as in (583) (174) (0263).

The next form of memory is long term.

Long-term memory is divided into declarative memory and procedural memory.

Procedural memory is vital for pronunciation or for gestures in sign languages, providing much quicker use and access to words and signs than declarative memory, just as one’s fingers might better remember their computer password.

Declarative memory is subdivided into semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory is associated with facts independent of any context, such as ‘a bachelor is an unmarried male’.

Before Descartes and a few others, there yawned back into the shadows the nearly 1,000-year-long, oppressive Dark Ages, during which ‘reasoning’ was an act of

power. Because of this, ad hominem arguments for one’s views – arguments based on some person’s reputation rather than the ideas at the heart of their arguments – were the standard.

Descartes’s work was the basis for much of Noam Chomsky’s theory of the mind and language, and their relationship, as Chomsky explains in his book Cartesian Linguistics.16 Chomsky seems to support Descartes’s claim that, while the body is a machine, the mind is not obviously physical.

In fact, this label is misleading because it suggests that something has been found that in fact has never been discovered, namely a disorder that affects only our linguistic abilities. To the contrary this disorder always seems to affect non-linguistic aspects of our

On the other hand, the model that takes language as an innate capacity of humans does predict highly specific language deficits. The view that language is instead an invention, a cultural artefact, predicts that language deficits are no more likely than bread-baking deficits.

!!!!

And it turns out that the thesis that the brain is a general purpose device predicts exactly what is found. Deficits that affect language are multifaceted.

Broca’s aphasia, also known as ‘motor aphasia’ or ‘expressive aphasia’, is characterised by relatively solid comprehension, but difficulty in speaking. Significantly, however, people with this form of aphasia also usually have paralysis, or at least weakness, in their right appendages – the arm, the leg, or both.

Wernicke’s aphasia, also known as ‘receptive aphasia’ or ‘sensory aphasia’. In this form of aphasia, the subject is able to speak fluently but unable to understand what is said to them. Moreover, their ‘fluent’ speech often is chock-a-block with abnormalities, such as nonsense words that, while fitting the sound patterns of their native language, mean nothing and are otherwise not words at all. There

What this team discovered is reminiscent of a G1 language. The aphasics in Gibson’s study use contextual clues more extensively than non-aphasic subjects in order to interpret what is spoken to them. Homo erectus, in my model at least, would have produced utterances that were highly ambiguous or vague or both, depending on his or her interlocutor’s ability to link speech to context for an interpretation more or less in the ballpark of what was intended.† Homo erectus might, therefore, have used a strategy similar to aphasics for interpreting sentences. But that is what all people do. All utterances are interpreted at least in part based on knowledge of culture, the context and the world.

collectively known as autistic spectrum disorder.

language and the role of conversation as the apex of linguistic experience. Therefore, we must take special care in our discussion here. Richard Griffin and Daniel C. Dennett of Tufts University get at what seems to be the general thread running through many autism cases, namely that sufferers of autism share a ‘pervasive bias to attend toward local rather than global features’. This is sometimes referred to as ‘weak central coherence’ and means that sufferers struggle to grasp an entire social situation in context.

One was a fellow redhead,

There is, in fact, no single disease or aetiology that corresponds to what the general public calls ‘autism’, only a set of symptoms that professionals have decided to group under the general label of autistic spectrum disorder.

phatic

Phatic language difficulties are particularly revealing, and include things like leave-takings (‘Goodbye’, ‘Adios’, ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ and ‘Bye-bye’), greetings (‘What’s up!’, ‘Dude, what is it?’, ‘Hello!’), gratitude expressions (‘Thanks’, ‘Oh wow, I can never repay you!’) and so on. Phatic language has long been analysed by linguists and anthropologists as a form of ‘grooming’, that is a recognition of the other as a person you value, however superficially. Interestingly, although English – which has phatic language – lacks grooming as a regular cultural ritual across most of its communities,

ASD sufferers often seem to lack this capacity of mutual ‘grooming’ behaviours that establish that two or more individuals ‘belong’ together and accept one another.

This matter arises in various aspects of the invention of language, such as in the fact that language is ‘just good enough’. Far from being a perfect biological system of any sort, language just gets by, often failing to communicate as well as one might imagine, its hearers employing general facts of the environmental context and world knowledge to interpret what is being said. And this echoes the strategies of aphasics and Homo erectus. Context and general knowledge are crucial to figure out the meanings of what people are hearing and in order to understand how to respond in the course of the conversation. For ASD sufferers, however, language is not even ‘good enough’. It is deficient, because for these people their language is unable to link up with the social

A startling conclusion emerges from deficits affecting language: There are no language-only hereditary disorders. And the reason for that is predicted by the theory of language evolution here – namely that there could not be such a deficit because there is no language-specific part of the brain. Language is an invention. The brain is no more specialised for language than for toolmaking, though over time both have affected the development of the brain in general ways that make it more supportive of these tasks.

Although communication is ancient, human speech is evolutionarily recent. Cognitive scientist and phonetician Philip Lieberman claims that the speech apparatus of modern Homo sapiens is only about 50,000 years old, so recent that even earlier Homo sapiens could not speak as we do today.