Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

by David Christian

How and why our species acquired the linguistic power needed to unleash this powerful new driver of change remain unclear. Was it, as American neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon has argued, a new ability to compress large amounts of information into symbols (deceptively simple words like symbol that carry a huge informational cargo)? Or was it the evolution of new grammar circuits in the human brain that helped us combine words according to precise rules so as to convey a great variety of different meanings, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has suggested? This is a tempting idea because, as another linguist, Steven Pinker, puts it, the really difficult trick was “to design a code that can extrude a tangled spaghetti of concepts into a linear string of words” and to do this so efficiently that the hearer could quickly re-create the spaghetti of concepts from the linear string.17 Was human language enabled by the increased space for thinking available in an enlarged cortex, which could hold enough complex thoughts in place to form syntactically complex sentences or let an individual memorize the meanings of thousands of words?18 Or do improved forms of language have their roots in the sociability and willingness to collaborate that are particularly well developed in our own species?19 Or was there perhaps a synergy between all these drivers?