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

by Daniel L. Everett

fraught

apex

There are tongues that have very little grammar and others in which it is extremely complex.

Charles Sanders Peirce.

pragmatism

cantankerous

mores.

The footprint of a cat is an index: it indicates, makes us expect to see, a cat.

Smoke indexes fire.

‘duality of patterning’,

Evolution made our brains. And humans took over from there.

the watchmaker analogy,

Evolution is a well-established fact. Only the explanations of how evolution happens or looks – natural selection, genetic processes and family trees – can be called theories. But evolution itself is not a theory.

This proposal for the origin of DNA is known as ‘panspermia’. According to the proponents of this view, nucleotides are more easily formed in the cold and ice of comets. Our planet was like a giant ovum floating in space, fertilised by space dust, meteors and asteroids, the spermatozoa of the universe, which brought DNA to us. There is even some convincing evidence for this view.

canines and humans are not merely distinguished by the components of their DNA but by the syntax of their DNA.

Chromosomes (carriers of DNA) ↓ DNA + histones§ ↓ Genes (segments of DNA)

the Holocene (11,000 years ago).

the first-known true primate genus, the Teilhardina, which were the precursors of all other primates, including us. The Teilhardina (named after the Jesuit theologian and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

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.

Mendel developed two important principles of genetic research: First was the principle of ‘segregation’, which is the idea that given traits are broken into two parts (known now as alleles) and only one of these parts passes from each parent to their shared offspring. Which allele is passed along is random.** Second came the principle of ‘independent assortment’. By this principle the pairs of alleles produced by the union of the parents’ haploid cells form new combinations of genes, that are not present in either the mother or the father.

First, as Thomas Morgan showed in his now famous work on fruit-fly mutations, genes are linked; that is they work in tandem in many traits. This is contrary to Mendel’s idea

Second, Mendel suggested that variation is always discrete, but in fact it is usually continuous. If one mates a 6'5" mother with a 5'2" father one will not get simply either a 5'2" vs a 6'5" child, but any height between those at minimum, among other possibilities. In other words, many (in fact most) traits blend.

Another crucial fact about evolution is that the targets of natural selection are phenotypes (externally visible physical and behavioural attributes, resulting from genes and environment), not genotypes

it is partially produced by histones, environment and culture.

Neutral mutations are important for evolutionary theory

There are other sources of micro- and macroevolution than natural selection. One of these is known as ‘genetic drift’.

if the original population of Homo erectus that left Africa had a different allele ratio than the population that remained in Africa, the former and latter populations would be separate founder populations for the ensuing generations.

change is that effected by culture, a form known as the ‘Baldwin effect’, and particularly relevant to the evolution of human language.

it is unlikely that complex sentences would provide a survival advantage, especially in light of the fact that there are languages spoken today, as we discuss later on, that lack such complex syntax.

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.

we know that humans and chimpanzees share 96 per cent or so of their DNA sequences, closer than any other two primates,

Humans are thus one of the newer apes.

The archaeological evidence in fact supports the order predicted by the sign progression of C. S. Peirce – indexes would have come first, followed by icons and then symbols.

In fact, there can be no adequate theory of language evolution without a sound theory of culture.

One idea of culture (mine) is the following: Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains and ranked values. Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment. The roles, knowledge and values of culture are only found in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members.1 Culture is abstract because it cannot be touched, or seen, or smelled – it is not directly observable. However, the products of culture, such as art, libraries, political roles, food, literature, science, religion, style, architecture and tolerance or intolerance, are non-abstract, visible and tangible.

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.

Proponents of this idea also maintain that grammar ‘popped’ into being some 50–65,000 years ago via a mutation. This suggestion, even though very widely accepted, has surprisingly little evidence in its favour and turns out to be a poorer fit with the facts than the idea that language was invented, but subsequently changed gradually through all Homo species, to fit different cultures. Though language is best understood as an invention, the mutation proposal is very influential. The 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.

John Searle noted how strange Chomsky’s conception of language actually is.

nexus

there are two alternative views of development that must be distinguished. These are uniformitarianism vs catastrophism.

upheavals,

‘saltations’.

bequeath

recursion.

three hypotheses for the origin of human language come to the fore.

The first hypothesis is known as ‘Grammar Came Last’.

The second idea, a very popular one, is that Grammar Came First.

The third principal hypothesis falls between the first two. It is that Grammar Came Later. Though symbols came first, the evolution of language required a synergy between grammar, symbols and culture, each one affecting the other.

This contrasts sharply with claims that language appeared very gradually over at least the past 3 million years