What did people have to talk about when language was new? They had been getting along fine without words, and suddenly they had a few, but what was there to say?
Donald M. Morrison has written a book (The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans) that proposes language got up and running as a teaching system. Speculation about teaching is common, but usually limited to teaching how to make stone tools. Opinions are mixed as to whether language was necessary to teach how to make the early tools, especially Oldowan tools. Showing without talking might well have been enough to teach how to make these simple tools. And then these tools stayed unchanged for eons and could not have helped that much in advancing language. But Morrison takes the subject of teaching more seriously and imagines it had a role in much more than telling apprentices, smash here.
One thing I really like about this approach is that it provides a natural means for the evolution of the speech triangle, which, on this blog, is the defining relationship of language. The speech triangle is formed by a (1) speaker and a (2) listener paying joint attention to a (3) topic. Normal animal and machine communications are limited to a one-dimensional relationship in which a (1) controller manipulates a (2) controlee. There is no obvious way to get from the one-dimensional relation to the speech triangle, or at least I never spotted one until Morrison came along.
The teacher student relationship combines both the simple controller-controlee relation with the human speech triangle relation. The feat that makes this leap to the speech-triangle possible is joint-attention. To teach, the controller-controlee relation is a little more complicated than usual because it requires the two points to pay attention to the same thing. The speech triangle is a bit simpler because the speaker and listener are not changing places so much.
Morrison says: "Once a group of early human ancestors, for whatever reason, became accustomed to combining pointing with other signals—either vocal or gestural, or both—they would have been vastly better at engaging in joint attentional activities. And because joint attentional activities (crucially, cooperative foraging for difficult-to-acquire food sources) were becoming increasingly important to the survival of the group, individuals who were genetically even a tiny bit better at using the new system would have been more successful…" (p. 149)
So the story goes: our ancestors were growing more cooperative and combined pointing with other actions to get everyone thinking on the same page, resulting in groups capable of paying joint attention to things. Then language could be used to teach members of the group (especially younger members) and establishing the speech triangle as a unique communication relationship. At last language was off and running.
This covers plenty of good ground, and gets the unique, relational aspects of language into the scenario. Like all scenarios, it is speculative and cannot be proven, but it does establish that a process was possible. When I first was snagged by the mystery of language’s origins, the point that held my attention was that it seemed impossible to have a beginning. So whenever I am satisfied that some detail or other is possible, I feel I am making progress. We will never know the details of the narrative, but we can at least say it is not an impossible mystery that was somehow overcome.
That, by the way, is one of my objections to Morrison’s tale. He is perfectly willing to argue that something was unlikely but could have happened once in a sky-blue moon and the unlikely development became fact. He actually states, “The emergence of language in our ancestors was, in this account, a highly unlikely biocultural accident that might never have happened, but did.” (152) I much prefer things to be overdetermined.
I have never forgiven Chomsky for appealing to the miraculous origin of concepts, and I’m not about to accept miracles in this case either. Evolution, even quick evolution like the rise of the Homo genus from habilis to sapiens takes a long time and many generations. Something unlikely may happen, but for it to stay around it needs to survive many bad breaks. Luck evens itself out. A bad bounce can determine a World Series, but not a whole season of baseball. There ought to be a statistical reason for some novelty to persist through the ages.
The emergence of language, I would say, was so likely an event that it probably happened many times, where one group on, say, the Serengeti started talking and another group near maybe the Mombasa coast quite independently started using words and another group up around somewhere else like the modern Kenya/South Sudan/Ethiopia border hit upon a third unrelated vocabulary.
The key achievement of Morrison’s book is to establish teaching as one of the defining characteristics of the human lineage and its critical presence at language’s start.
I like to imagine what I call two-dimensional teaching. One dimension is practical, the other humanizing. Practical teaching is not limited to humans, although as Morrison points out, we engage in a great deal more practical teaching than any other lineage, but the humanizing side is the astonishing part. It deals with things a person need not know in order to live a successful life of feeding and reproducing. Those are the Darwinian requirements that every species must master.
Humanizing knowledge is the cultural stuff that can be irrelevant to survival or even impede it. Before the invention of writing, this was the knowledge that was always one generation away from being lost. It includes things like manners, i.e., the proper way of doing something. Shaking hands is an example of this kind of learning. In my own case, I was taught by my father to look the person in the eye, use a firm grip, and express pleasure at greeting that person. As a result, I am always aware when the person I shake hands with looks the other way. We shall never know, but it is possible that as long ago as Homo habilis (2.3 to 1.65 million years ago) our lineage had some taught ritual for greeting one another and folks were judged according to how well they reflected similar training in the greeting. That is what I call a humanizing lesson. Once it is lost; it is gone forever, but while it lasts it is a peculiarly human bit of behavior.
This kind of little thing can define great splits. In the film Zorba the Greek, Zorba says of a French woman living in the town that she was forever an outsider because she crossed herself the wrong way. The Orthodox in the town finished the action by touching the right side of the chest and then the left. The Catholic woman from France touched the left side first and then the right. So every time she prayed she showed her foreignness. Surely differences of that nature go way way deep in the lineage, reflecting different teaching traditions that had gone on for generations.
Morrison puts the possible origin of language at 3 million years ago, which would bring us back to the australopithecine era. Of course, whenever they began, the original languages were far simpler than any modern language (which Morrison suggests may have been as recent as 200 thousand or even 100 thousand years ago). So the humanizing lessons of manners, mythology, and specialized knowledge are at least as old as Homo sapiens and verbal instruction of some sort is much older.
By focusing on teaching, Morrison hits on a trait that is especially important in thinking about humans. We are able to evolve at a much greater rate than Darwinian processes allow. A mutation spreads generation by generation. But ideas can spread among a talking and teaching species at the speed of sound. Culture outpaces biology so rapidly that, by now, very little of our behavior is innate. Even gasps of astonishment vary from culture to culture. What is inborn is our ability and desire to learn from our elders.
At some point teaching becomes less common, to be replaced by mutual thinking. Morrison calls this a shift to “civil discourse.” His book continues to be interesting and provocative, but it moves a bit beyond the focus of this blog. So I will stop here. There are some other things to note about the book, so I will have a few more posts about it.
NOTE Morrison replies: " believe we're actually agreed on the role of something like "luck" in language origins. The fact that humans alone, of all remaining primate species, managed to escape Bicketon's "prison of animal communication" was not, I think we both agree, inevitable. But neither was it, as I think we also both agree, a "miracle." Nature, as I've written somewhere, doesn't need miracles to perform its work, just known evolutionary processes and mechanisms. But, while the spark that triggered the evolution of language must have been a kind of accident...a confluence of unlikely events...the explosive coevolution of brains, language, technology, etc. that followed was, like any explosion, unstoppable. "
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