How
Language
Began
The Story of Humanity’s
Greatest Invention
Daniel L. Everett
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York • London
Language is not an instinct, based on genetically transmitted knowledge coded in a discrete cortical ‘language organ’. Instead it is a learned skill … that is distributed over many parts of the human brain.
Philip Lieberman
For John Davey,
mentor and friend
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
Part One: The First Hominins
1. Rise of the Hominins
2. The Fossil Hunters
3. The Hominins Depart
4. Everyone Speaks Languages of Signs
Part Two: Human Biological Adaptations for Language
5. Humans Get a Better Brain
6. How the Brain Makes Language Possible
7. When the Brain Goes Wrong
8. Talking with Tongues
Part Three: The Evolution of Language Form
9. Where Grammar Came From
10. Talking with the Hands
11. Just Good Enough
Part Four: Cultural Evolution of Language
12. Communities and Communication
Conclusion
Suggested Reading
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
List of Figures
1. The semiotic progression
2. The clade of humanity
3. Primate phylogenetic tree
4. The hominin family tree
5. Homo erectus
6. Olduwan tool kit
7. Language is a nexus
8. John said that Bill saw Irving
9. Makapansgat manuport/pebble/cobble
10. Erfoud manuport
11. A Schöningen spear
12. Erectus shell etchings from Java
13. Olduwan tool kit
14. Acheulean tools
15. Levalloisian tools
16. Venus of Berekhat Ram
17. Midsagittal view of the brain
18. Ventral view of the brain
19. Dorsal view of the brain
20. Cytoarchitecture/Brodmann areas
21. The larynx
22. The International Phonetic Alphabet
23. Southern California English vowels
24. Vowel spectrogram
25. Yesterday, what did John give to Mary in the library?
26. Extended duality of patterning – making a sentence
27. Syllables and sonority
28. Phonological hierarchy
29. Morphosyntactic hierarchy
30. Types of language by word type
31. Grammatical structure
32. The gesture continuum
33. The growth point
34. ‘The big boy’
35. Shannon’s conduit metaphor of communication
Picture Credits
Figure 5: Copyright © John Gurche; Figures 6, 13, 14, 15: Didier Descouens (CC-BY-SA-4.0) – Museum of Toulouse; Figures 9, 10: Copyright © Robert G. Bednarik; Figure 11: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian Institution; Figure 12: Wim Lustenhouwer, VU University Amsterdam; Figures 17, 18, 19: From Blumenfeld: Neuroanatomy through Clinical Cases, Second Edition, Sinauer Associates, Inc., 2010; Figure 20: Reprinted from Neuroanatomy of Language Regions of the Human Brain, Michael Petrides, Cytoarchitecture, Pages 89–138, Copyright 2014, with permission from Elsevier; Figure 21: www.theodora.com/anatomy, used with permission; Figure 22: http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Copyright © 2015 International Phonetic Association; Figure 33: Figure 4.2.3, Gesture and Thought, David McNeill, 2005, University of Chicago Press.
Preface
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 t
hat 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.
Introduction
In the beginning was the Word.
John 1:1
No, it wasn’t.
Dan Everett
IT WAS A SULTRY MORNING IN 1991, along the Kitiá river in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil, some 200 miles (320 kilometres) in a single-engined plane from the nearest town. I found myself fitting headphone mics on two slender, weather-hardened men, Sabatão (sa-ba-TOWN) and Bidu (bee-DOO). This time of day would usually find them in the jungle, armed with eight-foot blowguns and quivers of poisoned darts, hunting for peccary, deer, monkey, or other game indigenous to their Eden. But today they were going to talk to each other while I bothered with recorder controls and sound levels.
Before we began I explained to them, again, in a mix of their language, Banawá (ba-na-WA) and Portuguese, what I wanted. ‘Talk to each other. About anything. Tell each other stories. Talk about the Americans and the Brazilians who visit the village. Whatever you want.’ I had coaxed and paid them to be here because I was after the holy grail of the linguistics field researcher – natural conversation (interactive, spontaneous communication involving more than one person). I knew from my past failures that natural conversations were nearly impossible to record. This is because the presence of a field researcher with recording equipment affects the perception of the task and contaminates the result so severely that one usually gets only stilted, unnatural exchanges that no native speaker would accept as a real conversation. (Imagine if someone sat you down with a friend, fitted you with a headset mic and then cued you, ‘Converse!’)
But today, as I tested the sound quality of the recording I was making, I could barely contain my excitement. They began like this:
Sabatão:
Bidu, Bidu! Let talk today.
Bidu:
Mmm.
S:
Let talk in our language
B:
Mmm.
S:
Daniel likes our language very much.
B:
Yes, I know.
S:
I will talk. You can then tell a story about that jaguar.
B:
Yes.
S:
Let’s remember how things were a long time ago.
B:
Yes. I remember.
S:
A long time ago the whites arrived. A long time ago the whites arrived in our village.
B:
Them I know.
They found us. We will work with them.
B:
Yes. Them I know.
Their conversation glided from topic to topic naturally for the better part of an hour.
Though I was several thousand miles from home, sweating profusely, swatting away wasps and blood-sucking flies, I nearly teared up after Sabatão and Bidu finished, forty-five minutes later. I thanked them enthusiastically for this verbal treasure they had provided me with. They smiled and left to go hunting with their blowguns and poisoned darts. I continued alone, transcribing (writing down every nuance phonetically), translating and analysing the recording. After a couple of days of hard work to make the data ‘presentable’, I turned over the recordings, my notes and the bulk of the remaining work of analysis to a graduate student who had accompanied me to the Amazon from the University of Manchester in England.
At the end of the day our research team – myself and three students – enjoyed an evening meal of beans, rice and peccary meat I had purchased from the Banawás. We sat around after the meal, discussing the jungle heat and bugs, the likes of which we’d never seen before, but especially we conversed about the recorded conversation of Bidu and Sabatão and how grateful we were to them. Conversations within conversations. Conversations about conversations.
Following the blink-of-an-eye Amazonian sunset, the Banawás came to visit, as is their custom. The four of us made Kool-Aid and coffee and opened a package of sweet biscuits for them. We first greeted the Banawá women. The female students handled most of the serving and greeting of the women as is culturally appropriate among the Banawás, who practise rigorous segregation of the sexes. Soon the men were allowed to sit down and we served more coffee, Kool-Aid and sweet biscuits. As we ate and drank, we chatted with the men, mainly answering their questions about our families and homes. Just like people everywhere do on a daily basis, we and the Banawás were building relationships and friendships through conversation.
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