That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Genesis 11:9
MORE THAN 60,000 GENERATIONS AGO, Homo erectus introduced language into the world. Not merely another form of animal communication, language is an advanced form of cultural expression, based on abilities unique to human cognition along with general principles of structure for information transfer.
The core of language is the symbol, a combination of a culturally agreed upon form with a culturally developed meaning. Human perceptual constraints and thinking limitations guide this process, but it is largely the output of human societies, their values, their knowledge and their social structures.
The symbol may have resulted from associating two objects by mistake, such as a tree root confused with a serpent, or simply by regular association of one thing in the world with another object or event, as Pavlov’s dog learned to associate food with the ringing of a bell. Once this connection was made, humans began to use their symbols, each one learning from the other. Since communication is an effort of the entire being, gestures, intonation, the lungs, the mouth, the tongue, the hands, body movements and even eyebrows were marshalled for use in language, just as they are in much other animal communication. These different components of our communicative effort in language would have broken symbols down into smaller and smaller parts as they also were used to build them into larger and larger units. Speech sounds, words, sentences, grammatical affixes and tones all emerged from the initial invention of the symbol, with the invention being improved and spreading over time by total societal involvement, just as all other inventions are. Meaningless elements (sounds like ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’) were combined to form meaningful items (such as the word ‘sat’) and duality of patterning emerged, itself leading next to three types of grammar. The first kind of grammar, G1, is little more than symbols arranged in rows like beads on a string: ‘Eat food. Man. Woman.’ Or even, ‘I see you. You see me?’ The next language type, G2, arranges symbols linearly (in a row), just like a G1 grammar, and hierarchically – combining symbols inside of other symbols, just as many modern European languages do. The third type of grammar, G3, does everything that the other types do, but with the added property of recursion, the ability to put one thing inside another thing of the same type without end. Language as a matryoshka doll. All three types of languages are still found in the world. All are fully functioning human languages appropriate for different cultural niches. Homo erectus communities spoke one or all of these types of grammars, in their far-flung outposts around the world.
Human languages change over time and cultures and speakers elaborate them in some places and simplify them in others. Contemporary languages are therefore different in their details from those of 2 million years ago. But the fact remains that 2 million years ago in Africa, a Homo erectus community began to share information among its members by means of language. They were the first to say, ‘It’s over there,’ or, ‘I am hungry.’ Maybe the first to say, ‘I love you.’
Erectus communities were unlike sapiens communities in many ways. But they were nevertheless societies of human beings discussing, deliberating, debating and denouncing, as they travelled the world and bequeathed to us their invention, language.
Each human alive enjoys their grammar and society because of the work, the discoveries and the intelligence of Homo erectus. Natural selection took those things that were most effective for human survival and improved the species until today humans live in the Age of Innovation, the Era of Culture, in the Kingdom of Speech.