This blog takes the position that language, in the sense of two or more people focusing together on a topic, is quite old. Archaeologists, Chomskyites and others tend to put it as a more recent in the human lineage, about 100 thousand or fewer years. I put it at approaching 2 million years. My main grounds for thinking such is based on cooperativeness and the idea that it took a long time to create the verbal environment that we now take for granted.
Slow evolution
I noticed an article from a couple of weeks back about the “truly” bilingual child, and I came across this passage, “Pediatricians routinely advise parents to talk as much as possible to their young children, to read to them and sing to them. Part of the point is to increase their language exposure, a major concern even for children growing up with only one language.”
It is a familiar sentiment, but it sparked me to think about the days when language was really new. At first people probably did not have too much to say to one another; talking was an occasional thing, and even today verbal richness is impaired if we are not surrounded by words. When language was new our ancestors could talk, but they were still linguistically impoverished when compared to today’s oral cultures. Their children did not grow up hearing a ceaseless yakety-yak and did not create a rich verbal environment themselves.
We can assume that language was first used to relate news of the here and now: there is a carcass we can scavenge yonder; I just saw a lion; your mother is down at the creek. News of this type is not going to produce chatterboxes. For that you need narratives, strings of two or more sentences: (1) there is a carcass we can scavenge yonder; (2) bring some cutting stones.
It seems unlikely that early talkers went straight to sentences. The pattern we see in children is probably a quick-time recapitulation of the developmental process—words, phrases, basic sentences; richer sentences; strings of sentences. The jump from words to phrases probably came quickly as a few captive bonobos have managed to join words meaningfully in sign language. I once heard a toddler use a phrase on her first birthday. I was inclined to attribute it to the excitement of a birthday party, but she quickly made phrases a regular part of her speech. Sentences, however, were another matter.
When we imagine early talkers—say, Homo erectus and precursors—we ought to think of their language like their tools, simple but persistently part of their lives. And we should try to imagine it staying that simple for perhaps a million years while their brain grew large enough to handle the load.
Full, transitive sentences join two things with an action, e.g., the zebra kicked the lion. Children use a few verbs right away—eat cookie; want juice—but most verbs are late in arriving. Some extra maturation of the brain appears to be required for a person to unite two things through a single action. Simply perceiving what happened requires a feat of attention that may be beyond a two-year-old. Anybody who has watched an unfamiliar sport knows how difficult it is to perceive just what happens in complex, unexpected actions.
Transitive verbs allow for mythological and abstract thinking. Abstract ideas like not fair are probably very old, but the idea of making something fair—as in I will weigh my mischief in the balance with three days labor—requires a very difficult concept. The verb weigh…in the balance is a metaphor that somehow compares apples (my mischief) and oranges (three days labor). We take for granted blind justice holding up scales, but the original person who spoke of such things was a first-class poet.
By 100,000 years ago, sentences, narratives, abstractions and metaphors were probably all there for the chatterboxes to drone on about, and to leave the archaeological clues that indicate cultures steeped in symbolism. But symbols did not spring fully ripened from the first talkers’ tongues.
Cooperation
The other line of reasoning that brings me to the same conclusion is Homo's hyper-sociality. The African savanna promotes togetherness. The grass eaters form herds and the predators hunt in groups. Loners like rhinoceroses and bull elephants need to be huge so the predators cannot harm them. With the savanna's emergence a few million years ago the already social primates that stayed on the plain had to become even more dependent on one another. What emerged from the process was a terrifying new species able to stand up to the predators and bring down the herders. The only way this success was possible was by regular cooperation and sharing.
Going back as far as Homo habilis we know that individuals taught other individuals how to make tools. The same tools turn up in many sites even thousands of miles apart and persisted unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years. It seems likely that the teaching relied more on demonstration than on telling, although words may have played a part.
Cooperation is not the first solution Darwinian processes attempt and most living organisms depend on themselves, but super-cooperative species like eusocial insects prosper because they share information. When cooperative sharing appears evolution has found a trick that pays off. The Homo lineage has probably been pointing and demonstrating since the beginning, meaning we have been motivated to help one another for almost two million years. Work with apes has already established that our ancestors had the brains to use words. If we combine the presence of brains and motivation, it seems strange to insist that words did not come for the first 1.7 million years. Indeed, I doubt anybody who insists language must be new. If they want to persuade me, find some evidence that cooperation is new, or that a properly motivated ape will have the tools to tell me a story.
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