Grooming.
Here is part of the scenario for language origins favored on this blog: long ago our ancestors began losing body hair with potentially ruinous dangers to the species. It reduced the ability to form bonds based on grooming and it made it difficult to move with a baby who, in previous generations, held on tightly to mama’s hair. The solution was bonding via babbling and sharing responsibility for the baby. For a long time, the human lineage made meaningless sounds that provided emotional ties, and eventually particularly sounds became associated with specific things or people.
I defend this argument by pointing out that vocal-based bonding still precedes language today. Infants go through a period of babbling before they talk and sometimes their babbling becomes quite social. Youtube is full of anecdotal evidence in the form of babies engaged in pseudo-conversations where they take turns exchanging noises. [example of 10 month old twins conversing without words].
There is also evidence that a language only flourishes when it is used as part of a social system among equals. Pidgins are languages that are limited to carrying out trade or giving orders. They turn into full languages (creoles) when they become a medium for conversing between peers. Second languages (e.g., the English language today) can become common as people interact with representatives of some imperial power, but they fade as the imperial power fades. Second languages only become first languages if the speakers themselves are assimilated into the larger community.
Arguing against this idea is the lack of vocal bonding in our immediate, evolutionary relatives. Chimps, bonobos, and gorillas do not engage in pseudo-conversations, taking turns making emotionally-charged but meaningless exchanges. Thus, I have had to argue that human communities are quite different from ape societies and evolved by breaking firmly with ape ways. The argument would probably be more persuasive if it could be tied a bit more fully to our ape origins.
And now, at long last, some scholars have reported finding evidence from the primate world that seems to bolster this blog’s story that we developed vocal bonds before we got meaningful talk. (See: Florence Levréro et al, Scientific Reports, “Social bonding drives vocal exchanges in Bonobos.”) Bonobos are tied with chimpanzees as humanity’s closest living relatives. They are less hierarchical than chimps and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years, but this blog has not joined in the general shouting… until now. Chimpanzees, which have been studied ceaselessly in the wild for over 50 years have not been very encouraging about conversations. Levrero and team reports, “ No evidence of spontaneous vocal coordinated exchanges has been found in wild chimpanzees, who display complex social interactions and cooperative abilities. Indeed, Arcadi found that chimpanzees do not ‘respond’ to the majority of calls they heard (within 5 sec), and that instead, bonded males tend to chorus together, matching each-other’s pant hoots.”
Bonobos, however, have now been studied making vocal coordinated exchanges in captivity. The critical observation reported was that, “Vocal affinity (the frequency of vocal interactions for each given dyad) was only explained by the ‘social affinity’ of individuals while the sex of callers, age differences and kinships were not significant predictors. Thus the stronger the ‘social affinity’ between two individuals, the more they are preferred vocal partners.” In less scholarly words, the chances of having a pseudo-conversation increases along with the increase in social bonding between pairs.
The authors conclude, “bonobos did not randomly respond to any group members but preferentially to some specific conspecifics with whom they maintain close bonds. This finding is consistent with the evolutionary function of call exchanges or chorusing which is often linked to social bonding. Interestingly, we observed an unbalanced vocal response rate between individuals (individual B systematically calls after individual A but the contrary is not true) that suggests that vocal exchanges may reflect an active search of building bonds.”
The authors assert that, “It is widely considered that socially-ruled communicative behaviour shared by humans and nonhuman primates may have been a crucial step in the coevolution of language and social life.” I can think of many linguists who do not say such a thing, but I am happy to nod along, since the authors’ data supports the blog’s thesis that very tight, vocalized bonding is older than meaningful conversations involving topics. In the face of an evolutionary crisis that reduced bonding by grooming, the human lineage already had a behavior that could be developed as an alternative: vocalized, emotional bonding, a.k.a. babbling.
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