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

by Daniel L. Everett

It is unsurprising that disagreement between experts occurs. In fact, consensus among experts often seems rarer than disagreement. Every scientific advance usually originates as a dispute concerning the interpretation of evidence for vs evidence against some thesis. Science is not about finding a ‘true’ theory. It is about finding the best theory, as scientists grope their way towards understanding.

Language is a gestalt

often borrow bad ideas from linguistics to make their case. The principal bad idea is that quotidian objects are not themselves symbolic. Tools are symbols when they are the product of a culture. If one finds tools in conjunction with evidence for shared values and knowledge in a society, there is no need to look any further than the tools themselves for symbols.

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. Not surprisingly, therefore, about 1.76 million years ago, roughly 300,000 years after the rise of Homo erectus, Olduwan tools were joined by other erectus-manufactured tools, in particular a new type called the Acheulean (Figure 14). Many people suggest that this long, mysterious period without innovation, longer by far than (yet still reminiscent of) the Dark Ages of Europe, is due to ‘low fidelity social transmission’. In other words, because erectus lacked language. 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.

Long-term memory is divided into declarative memory and procedural memory. Procedural memory is implicit memory of processes involving motor skills. When trying to remember a password, your declarative memory might fail you, in the sense that you cannot recall the names of all the symbols you have chosen for your password. But your procedural memory can come to the rescue if you will simply set yourself down at the keyboard and type the password. In a sense, your fingers ‘remember’ a code that your conscious memory has forgotten. Or someone might be trying to teach another person how to play a riff on the guitar and forget the notes. They can still teach the riff, however, by slowly playing it for the learner. But be careful not to play too slowly. Procedural memory seems to prefer to keep things at tempo.