AROUND 1920 A RATTLESNAKE killed my great-grandfather outside of Lubbock, Texas. Walking home from church with his family across a cotton field, Great-grandfather Dungan was telling his children to watch out for snakes in the field when he was suddenly struck in the thigh. His daughter, Clara Belle, my grandmother, told me that he suffered for three days, crippled in pain and screaming, until he finally expired in his bedroom at the back of the house.
One did not have to be at the scene of the incident to know that, because it was a rattlesnake, it must have ‘warned’ my great-grandfather before striking. But, considering the outcome, there must have been a communication failure between Papa Dungan and the snake. My grandmother saw the snake bite her father and she talked about the event a great deal during my childhood. She often remembered the moments when the snake was ‘warning’ her father, as if the beast would use actual words if it only could. However, people who know that rattlesnakes communicate often confuse their tail shaking with language, leading them to anthropomorphise and evoke human terms, such as saying they ‘tell’ threatening creatures ‘to stay away’ by shaking the keratin-formed, interlocking, hollow parts at the end of their tail to produce a loud rattle. Though that action is not technically language, the snake’s rattling carries important information nonetheless. My great-grandfather paid a heavy price for failing to heed that message.
Rattlesnakes aren’t the only animal communicators, of course. In fact, all animals communicate, receiving and transmitting information to other animals, whether of their own or different species. As I will later explain, however, we should resist labelling the rattle of a snake ‘language’. A rattlesnake’s repertoire is splendidly effective, but for severely limited purposes. No snake can tell you what it wants to do tomorrow or how it feels about the weather. Messages like those require language, the most advanced form of communication earth has yet produced.
The story of how humans came to have language is a mostly untold one, full of invention and discovery, and the conclusions that I come to through that story have a long pedigree in the sciences related to language evolution – anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, palaeoneurology, archaeology, biology, neuroscience and primatology. Like any scientist, however, my interpretations are informed by my background, which in this case are my forty years of field research on languages and cultures of North, Central and South America, especially with hunter-gatherers of the Brazilian Amazon. As in my latest monograph on the intersection of psychology and culture, Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn.
As far back as the work of psychologist Kurt Goldstein in the early twentieth century, researchers have denied that there are language-exclusive cognitive disorders. The absence of such disorders would seem to suggest that language emerges from the individual and not merely from language-specific regions of the brain. And this in turn supports the claim that language is not a relatively recent development, say 50–100,000 years old, possessed exclusively by Homo sapiens. My research suggests that language began with Homo erectus more than one million years ago, and has existed for 60,000 generations.
As such, the hero of this story is Homo erectus, upright man, the most intelligent creature that had ever existed until that time. Erectus was the pioneer of language, culture, human migration and adventure. Around three-quarters of a million years before Homo erectus transmogrified into Homo sapiens, their communities sailed almost two hundred miles (320 kilometres) across open ocean and walked nearly the entire world.
Erectus communities invented symbols and language, the sort that wouldn’t seem out of place today. Although their languages differed from modern languages in the quantity of their grammatical tools, they were human languages. Of course, as generations came and went, Homo sapiens unsurprisingly improved on what erectus had done, but there are languages still spoken today that are reminiscent of the first ever spoken, and they are not inferior to other modern languages.
The Latin word Homo means ‘man’. Therefore, any creature of the Homo genus is a human being. In two-word Latin biological nomenclature, a genus is the broader classification of which a species is a variant. Thus, Homo erectus describes a species – erectus, ‘standing’ – that is a member of the human, Homo, genus. Homo erectus thus means ‘standing man’. This is the first species of humans. Homo neanderthalensis means ‘Neander Valley man’, based on the fact that its fossils were first discovered in the Neander Valley of Germany. Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’, and suggests, erroneously as we see, that modern humans (we are all Homo sapiens) are the only wise or intelligent humans. We are almost certainly the smartest. But we are not the only smart humans who ever lived.
Erectus also invented the other pillar of human cognition: culture. Who we are today was partially forged by the intelligence, travels, trials and strength of Homo erectus. This is worth stating because too many sapiens fail to reflect on the importance of earlier humans to who we are today.
My interest in language and its evolution is personal. All of my life, from my earliest years growing up on the Mexico–California border, languages and cultures have fascinated me. And how could they not? Incredibly, all languages share at least some grammatical characteristics, whether it be words for things, words for events or conventions for ordering and structuring sounds and words, or organising paragraphs, stories and conversations. But languages are perhaps even more unlike one another than alike. However easy or difficult these differences may be to discover, they are always there. Today, there is no universal human language, whether or not there was at some period in the remote past. And there is no mental template for grammar that humans are born with. Languages’ similarities are not rooted in a special genetics for language. They follow from culture and common information-processing solutions and have their own individual evolutionary stories.
But each language satisfies the human need to communicate. While many people in today’s world are tempted to spend more time on social media than perhaps they should, it is the pull of linguistic intercourse that is mainly driving them there. No matter how busy some are, it is hard for them to avoid entering into some ‘conversation’ on the screen in front of them to opine on issues about which they often know little and care less. Whether via water cooler conversations, or absorbing information from television, or discussing plays, or reading or writing novels, talking and writing bind humans ever more tightly into a community.
As a result, language – not communication – is the dividing line between humans and other animals. Yet it is impossible to understand language without understanding something of its origin and evolution. For centuries people have offered ideas about where and when language originated. They have wondered which of the many species of the genus Homo was the first to have language. And they have asked what language sounded like at the aurora of human history. The answer is easy. Language gradually emerged from a culture, formed by people who communicated with one another via human brains. Language is the handmaiden of culture.
How Language Began offers a unique, wide-ranging story of the evolutionary history of language as a human invention – from the emergence of our species to the more than 7,000 languages spoken today. Their complexity and range was invented by our species, later developing into local variants, each new linguistic community altering language to fit its own culture. To be sure, the first languages were also constrained by human neurophysiology and the human vocal apparatus. And all languages came about gradually. Language did not begin with gestures, nor with singing, nor with imitations of animal sounds. Languages began via culturally invented symbols. Humans ordered these initial symbols and formed larger symbols from them. At the same time symbols were accompanied by gestures and pitch modulation of the voice: intonation. Gestures and intonation function together and separately to draw attention to, to render more salient perceptually, some of the symbols in an utterance – the most newsworthy for the hearer. This system of symbols, ordering, gestures and intonation emerged synergistically, each component adding something that led to something more intricate, more effective. No single one of these components was part of language until they all were – the whole giving purpose to the parts – as far back as nearly two million years ago. Language was culturally invented and shaped and made possible by our large, dense brains.1 This combination of brain and culture explains why only humans have ever been able to talk.
Other authors have labelled language an ‘invention’, only to qualify that reasonable assessment by adding ‘but it’s not really an invention. That is a metaphor.’ But the use of the word ‘invention’ here is not a metaphor. It means what it says – human communities created symbols, grammar and language where there had been none before.
But what is an invention? It is a creation of culture. Edison alone did not invent the light bulb; he needed Franklin’s work in electricity nearly 200 years before him. No one person invents anything. Everyone is part of a culture and part of each other’s creativity, ideas, earlier attempts and the general world of knowledge in which they live. Every invention is built up over time, bit by bit. Language is no exception.