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

by Daniel L. Everett

touted

The moon is made of green cheese. Or so Peter says. The moon is made of green cheese. Or so Peter says. Says John. The moon is made of green cheese. Or so Peter says. Says John. Says Mary. Says Irving. Says Ralph. Peter says that the moon is made of green cheese. John says that Peter says that the moon is made of green cheese. Ralph said that Irving said that Mary said that John said that Peter said that the moon is made of green cheese.

with more and more people they do not know, increase, so do the demands on grammar,

Non-human creatures appear to use syntax. Therefore grammar is not exclusive to humans. Consider Alex the parrot, who, according to years of research by Irene Pepperberg, spoke (some) English and could understand even grammars with recursion and tree structures.

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’.

First, there are indexes. Indexes are ancient, far predating humans. Every animal species uses indexes, which are physical connections to what they represent, such as smells, footprints, broken branches and scat.

If an animal could not interpret indexes, then lions would never find prey, hyenas would search in vain for carrion

These icons, such as the Makapansgat pebble or the Erfoud manuport or the Venus of Berekhat Ram, show some of the earliest steps from non-intentional indexes to the intentional creation of signs. The object is seen through a physical resemblance.

After all, modern day emojis are able to act as a kind of icon-based language.

The next step is the most important of all the signs for language – the symbol.

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. First, Pirahã women use a more impressionistically ‘guttural’ speech than men. This is produced by two culturally motivated uses of the Pirahãs’ vocal apparatus. One is that most Pirahã women’s sounds are articulated further back in the mouth, relative to men’s speech. Where a man might produce an /n/ by placing the tongue just behind the upper teeth, in women’s pronunciation, an /n/ places the tongue further back, to just before the alveolar ridge at the roof of the mouth (which can be felt by running the tongue just behind the upper teeth).

Also, Pirahã women have one sound fewer than the men. Whereas Pirahã men have the consonants /p/, /t/, /h/, /s/, /b/, /g/ and /?/ (glottal stop), the women use /h/ instead of /s/. For men the word for manioc meal is ?ágaísi whereas for women it is ?ágaíhi. This use of different articulation along with a different number of phonemes is a way of representing iconically via sounds the social status and gender of speakers.

According to the theory of Peirce, however, indexes, icons and symbols are still insufficient for language to get off the ground. One needs something in addition, which Peirce referred to as the ‘interpretant’.

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

latch

manuport

For more than 3 million years visual icons have been collected by hominins, from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens. These icons suggest that the icon-possessor(s) quite possibly grasped a connection between form and meaning – what the icon is a visual representation of.

Art is a visual form with shared meaning, the communication of emotions, of cultural moments, of ideas and so on via shared tacit cultural knowledge.

The erectus (or if one prefers, Heidelbergensis) male

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.

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.

the ‘great leap forward’ theory, suggests that change has occurred in the last 50,000 years, due to the appearance of art and leaps in cultural evolution. But there is no compelling reason to suppose that this change in the archaeological record is the result of biological evolution.

So why is it that there seems to be no significant change in the brain for the past 200 millennia?

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.

thousand centuries ago as sapiens emerged from Africa.

Humans have to live more slowly in order to live longer. This is common in the animal kingdom – slower growth usually means longer lives.

humans have very short periods between births, usually a feature of shorter-lived creatures. In this respect, humans are a cross between whales and rabbits.

looking at the brain of erectus there is evidence from their cultural accomplishments that they had language.

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. First, their speech may not have carried over long distances. This is a result of their inability to form the same range of vowels that sapiens can produce,

garbled

The hyoid bone of erectus was shaped more like the hyoid bones of the other great apes and had not yet taken on the shape of sapiens’ and neanderthalensis’ hyoids (these two being virtually identical).

conflate

But there is no evidence that brains are becoming larger or more specialised across sapiens either currently or since the beginning of this species.

But evolution is not trying to build a brainiac. It is concerned merely with building a creature that is just good enough to have viable offspring.

vie

It may be that physically weaker or congenitally infirm individuals have no evolutionary disadvantage in the environment of a nurturing culture. This is good for humans, because cultural niches change, which favours increased diversity in the species, spawning ever more nurturing cultures, accelerating the change and survivability of those who at one time may not have survived. Eugenics advocated the improvement of human genetic heritage, but by failing to recognise the power of culture in shaping our evolution, eugenics had it wrong. Culture not only is the key to improving the species and the survivability of all, but also has liberated us from the strictly biological.

they learned to cook food, which in turn helped them to eat more meat, which helped to shrink their guts. Repeating, then, calories that were once used for digestion were then freed up for Homo’s brains.

the body as a holistic apparatus. Human brains are smarter when our intestines are smaller.

bootstraps.

the beginning of agricultural economies around 10,000 years ago on (arguably) opposite sides of the globe, in both Sumeria and Guatemala.

As philosopher Andy Clark has claimed for years, culture ‘supersizes’ our brains.

Surprisingly, what emerges from such study is that there is little evidence that human brains have genetically specialised tissue for language.

neuroplasticity,

And there is, of course, also synaptic plasticity

Brains literally change – adding more connections, thus more white matter,† in response to learning

The average human brain burns around 325–350 calories per day. That is about one-fourth of the average human’s daily calorie consumption at rest (1,300) and about one-eighth of the average active person’s requirement of around 2,400 calories per day.

Compared to other primates and mammals of our size, humans allocate a much larger share of their daily energy budget to ‘feed their brains’.

Beyond calorie consumption, another reason to lack a brain is redundancy. Parasites can live in human guts without needing to think, ingesting whatever comes their way because of the brain-guided decisions of their hosts. They don’t need brains because they use ours.

Finally, the third major disadvantage of larger brains is that there is a conflict in bipeds between the benefits of narrow hips to aid movement and the need for a birth canal large enough to accommodate increasingly larger-brained infants. Big brains can kill mothers in childbirth because the birth canal is small. This is so that the mother can walk, while the brain is large, so that the child can think.