The idea that a founding population crossed the straits piecemeal, without planning, is implausible – fifty or more ‘shipwrecks’ as it were, within a short time, where everyone survived. They would have had to arrive during a short period to guarantee survival and this would have required an unfeasible amount of coincidence. It is, of course, possible that a flotilla of logs was launched, of which fifty or more made it to the island. But, while that would not lessen the intent and adventure of erectus in crossing to Flores, it would provide a poor explanation for the settlements on Socotra and other islands described below, an island out of sight, requiring a sense of imagination and exploration for a large erectus population to arrive within a time frame short enough to guarantee their survival. Moreover, archaeologist Robert Bednarik and others have provided extensive and convincing evidence that Homo erectus built watercraft and crossed the sea at various times in the lower Palaeolithic era, around 800,000 years ago (and three-quarters of a million years before Homo sapiens made sea crossings). Bednarik has even built and sailed replicas of the kinds of bamboo rafts that he believes erectus would have constructed, fabricating water containers from bamboo and using techniques that would have been within the reach of Homo erectus.
Many archaeologists have provided evidence of erectus technology that, while not surprising for sapiens, force the reconsideration of the common view that Homo erectus could do little more than grunt to communicate and had no actual words. Further examples of erectus technology and art include decorations, bone tools, stone tools, evidence of adding colour to art, wooden artefacts, backed knives, burins (stone chisels) and protoiconic palaeoart.†
Given all of this evidence, it is nearly certain that erectus had developed culture. But ‘culture’, once again, means more than that they built tools or that they passed down the knowledge of how to build and use these tools to subsequent erectus generations. Culture entails symbolic reasoning and projecting meaning on to the world, meaning that is not about things as they are, but as they are interpreted, used and perceived by members of the community that uses them. Culture transforms ‘things’ into symbols and meaning. And if erectus had symbols, it had language.
The case for erectus culture is further strengthened when one learns that Flores is not the only island to which erectus voyaged. And although there are no remains of actual million-year-old wooden or bamboo boats that they might have employed, evidence that they inhabited isolated islands neither accessible by swimming nor visible from shore suggests very strongly that they intentionally journeyed miles across the open sea. This conclusion seems warranted, in spite of the fact that the oldest boats we have physical evidence of are dugout canoes from the Upper Palaeolithic, only a few thousand years old.
As recently as 2008, Russian researchers found very primitive stone tools on the isolated island of Socotra, more than 150 miles (240 kilometres) off the Horn of Africa and 240 miles (400 kilometres) off the coast of Yemen. And the timeline is roughly the same as it was for Flores – these discoveries are estimated to be from 500,000 to 1 million years old.
One can imagine the inspiration for the voyage to Flores – witnessing a herd of Stegodontidae swimming there. But this cannot explain the innovation, confrontation of the unknown and abstract thinking that were manifested by the Homo erectus population that sailed to Socotra, Crete, Flores and other islands. Indeed, on that voyage they seem to have been exploring, which requires a form of abstract thinking that goes beyond the here and now, the observable, to the imagined. And evidence of imagination is evidence for abstract thinking. Taken together, the currents erectus had to overcome to reach Flores and the challenge of the unknown on the voyage to Socotra establish clearly that erectus cooperated for a common goal, utilising innovative technology. Such accomplishments imply the ability to communicate at a level more advanced than any creature until that time.
Of course, it is possible that erectus never intentionally sailed, but that they built rafts for fishing close to shore and were blown off-course to islands (or death) in the open sea. This likely happened at times. Modern sailors suffer the same fate occasionally. Yet even this possibility would be evidence that Homo erectus had enough language to build rafts. But this ‘blown off course’ suggestion fails to explain the settlements we see on various islands, from the Sea of Flores and the Gulf of Aden. For each viable settlement and subsequent cultural development, at least 40–50 Homo erectus men, women and children would have had to have arrived almost simultaneously.
But what kind of language did erectus speak? What minimal form of communication would it have needed? The answer seems to be something like what I refer to as a ‘G1 language’. This is a language in which symbols (words or gestures) are ordered in a conventional way when spoken (such as subject-verb-object, as in ‘John saw Mary’), although, somewhat contradictorily, the interpretation of the symbols in this agreed-upon order can be very loose. Thus, ‘Mary hit John’ might mean in the first instance that Mary hit John, but might have other meanings available according to the context, such as ‘Mary was hit by John’ or ‘Mary bumped into John’ and so on. The context in which the words are uttered as well as what the speaker and hearer know about Mary and John, in conjunction with general cultural knowledge and the agreed-upon word order, will determine the interpretation intended. A G1 language is nevertheless a real language. It is not some ‘protolanguage’ (qualitatively different from a ‘real’ language). Such a language can actually express everything needed by a particular culture and is ‘expandable’ to fit additional needs if the culture becomes more complicated. Think again of examples like ‘No shirt. No shoes. No service.’ This can mean quite a few things, but members of American culture at least interpret the phrase as an admonition from a business establishment, even though there is little in the words themselves that indicates such a thing. Culture serves as a filter on what the meaning is. Grammar is another partial filter. So in this case, ‘Mary hit John’ might mean that Mary hit or bumped into John, but it would be harder for it to mean that John bumped into Mary because of the word order imposed by the grammar, which acts as a (weak) filter on the possible meanings of the sentence. Whenever the grammatical filter is less fine-meshed, as in a G1 language, the role of culture in aiding the meaning becomes even greater, though it is always present in all languages.
The archaeological evidence leads to the conclusion that Homo erectus possessed creative thought and culture. In other words, in spite of scepticism from some researchers, erectus spoke, was creative, and organised its communities by principles of culture. The cultural evidence is otherwise inexplicable. Erectus were seafarers and manufacturers not only of technologically interesting hand tools, from Lower Palaeolithic Olduwan tools to Upper Palaeolithic Mousterian tools, but also vessels able to cross large bodies of water. Erectus communities, such as the one Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, developed cultural specialisation of tasks. And erectus controlled fire, as evidence from several erectus sites suggests.
Once again, though, erectus’s speech and language may have differed significantly from those of modern humans, yet erectus languages nevertheless would have been full languages. So long as they possessed symbols, ordering of the symbols and meanings partially determined by those components in conjunction with context they had language. And it seems clear for various reasons that they would not only have spoken their language but also have used gestures as aids to communication. Neither gestural languages nor music nor controlled use of pitch (as in singing) would have come first (see chapter 10 below). Simple (G1) languages emerged with grammar, which, accompanied by pitch modulation and gestures, produced the most effective communication system the world had ever seen. This is the minimum form of language possible.
Erectus speech, however it sounded, is an important but secondary question. Homo sapiens’ still bigger brains, longer experience with language, a more developed vocal apparatus and so on, give us huge advantages. They mean that sapiens’ languages are more advanced, in t
he sense of having larger vocabularies and probably more complex (hierarchical and or recursive) syntax. Nevertheless, the upshot is that there is no need to suppose that erectus spoke a subhuman ‘protolanguage’.
A protolanguage by definition is not a fully developed human language, but rather merely a ‘good enough’ system for very rudimentary communication. But the kind of language that erectus would have used would have been good enough not only for erectus but also for modern sapiens, depending on the needs of individual cultures, because a G1 language can communicate almost as well as a G3 language.
Erectus travelled almost the entire world, though based on current evidence never made it to America, Australia or New Zealand. But they made it to many other places. Here is a brief summary of erectus sites and time ranges:
Middle East
Gesher Benot Ya’aqov (790 thousand years ago)
Erq al-Ahmar (1.95 million years ago)
Ubeidya (1.4 million years ago)
Bizat Ruhama (1.96 million years ago)
Italy
Pirro Nord (1.6 million years ago)
Turkey
Dursunlu (before 1 million years ago)
Iran
Kashafrud (before 1 million years ago)
Pakistan
Riwat (before 1 million years ago)
Pabbi Hills (before 1 million years ago)
Georgia (before 1 million years ago)
Spain (before 1 million years ago)
Indonesia (around 1 million years ago)
China (before 1 million years ago)
It bears repeating that, in their daily life, erectus communities had to care for children and strategise together. They needed to plan things like what to do today, where to hunt, or which men stay with the women and children and which go to find food. They needed to share information about signs ahead, about evidence of animals in the vicinity, or how to care for their sick, even if that amounted to little more than feeding them. It is, of course, speculation to imagine how they did these things or how well erectus communities understood or planned what they were doing, how they cared for each other, or how they conducted their daily lives. But by using the examples of current hunter-gatherer populations, along with the intelligence that erectus needed to have based on archaeological evidence, these suggestions are probably not too far off.
Erectus communities also had to learn to evaluate others and deal with them. There would be cheaters and laggards on the journey. Perhaps murderers. There would have been injured people. They would have desperately needed to work together. These pressures developed their intelligence and cultural connection more each day, along with their values and priorities.
Erectus did not simply walk single-file or run randomly around the world. They were organised. They were smart. They were a society of cultured humans. And they must have had language.
And yet what is language after all? With all this discussion of the language of Homo species, it is time to examine the nature of human language in more detail.
* In a web-based discussion (http://www.athenapub.com/13sunda.htm) authors Roy Larick of the Shore Cultural Centre, Euclid, Ohio, Russell L. Ciochon of the Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, and Yahdi Zaim of the Department of Geology, Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia, claim that:
Fossils representing very early Homo erectus populations are now known from the highland Rift Valley of East Africa, the Caucasus Mountains that mediate southeast Europe and southwest Asia, and from the intensely volcanic slopes of the Sunda subduction zone. Circum-Mediterranean archaeological sites representing these groups may be present in northern Algeria (Ain Hanech), Andalusian Spain (Orce), and the Negev (Erq el Amar). Late Olduvai subchron archaeological sites are also known on the Himalayan fore slope (Riwat, Pakistan), and in southern China (Longgupo). The Plio-Pleistocene carnivores associated with humans are also known from Greece (Mygdonia Basin).
The commonalties among these sites call for a new interpretation of early Homo erectus. All these sites fall into the transcontinental Tethys geotectonic corridor, the grand suture at the southern margin of the Eurasian continental plate with southward extensions into the East African Rift and the Sunda subduction zone. A global time marker immediately precedes and overlaps with all sites, the Olduvai subchron (1.96 to 1.79 mya [million years ago]). With the corridor and the subchron, we can begin to talk about Homo erectus biogeography as neither African nor East Asian, but as Plio-Pleistocene Tethys.
† Backed knives ‘were made by steeply trimming one edge of a blade by pressure flaking. This design allowed the user to apply pressure against the blunted edge with an index finger for cutting with the opposite sharp edge. Experiments have shown that a backed knife made of stone can skin an animal about as fast as a steel knife.’ (www.lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/aurignacbackedknifeag7large.htm)
4
Everyone Speaks Languages of Signs
… by ‘semiosis’ I mean … an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object and its interpretant …
Charles Sanders Peirce (1907)
WHAT IS LANGUAGE? Is language indeed something that Homo erectus invented? It is worth restating the basic principle: language arises from the convergence of human invention, history, physical and cognitive evolution. The inventions that would have moved humans towards the languages spoken today were first icons and then symbols.
The archaeological evidence in fact supports the order predicted by the sign progression of C. S. Peirce – indexes would have come first, followed by icons and then symbols. We find indexes earlier than icons and icons earlier than symbols in the prehistoric record. Moreover, indexes are used by perhaps all creatures, icons recognised by fewer creatures and symbols used habitually only by humans. Although Peirce in fact believed that icons were simpler than indexes, he primarily had in mind the human elaborations to indexes, not – in my opinion – how the signs are found in nature per se.*
Newspaper headlines, store regulations, movie titles and other unusual forms of modern language are occasionally reminders of how simple language can be. There are some famous examples of languages reminiscent of possible early languages in the movies:
You Jane. Me Tarzan.
Eat. Drink. Man. Woman.
And in store signs:
No shirt. No shoes. No service.
No ticket. No wash.
These examples can even be found on billboards: You drink. You drive. You go to jail.
In spite of their grammatical simplicity, we understand these examples just fine. In fact, one can construct similar sentences in any language that will be intelligible to all native speakers of the language, as in these examples from Brazilian Portuguese.
Olimpiadas Rio. Crime, sujeira.
Olympics Rio. Crime, dirt.
Voce feio. Eu bonito.
You ugly. Me pretty.
Sem lenço. Sem documento.
Without handkerchief. Without document.†
Such phrases are interesting because they prove that humans can interpret language even when it isn’t structured grammatically. Homo erectus’s language might have been no more complicated than these examples, though quite possibly it was more intricate. What all of these examples show, however, and what would have also held for the language of Homo erectus, as for all of the languages of Homo sapiens, is that language works fine when it is underdetermined. In understanding language or people or cultures, context is crucial. It is necessary to take a holistic perspective on interpretation. What was the organism, its connection to the environment, and the thing it invented like? These are the questions that flow from a holistic perspective on the invention and evolution of language.
This idea is explored in detail by anthropologist Agustin Fuentes of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He makes a case for an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’. What Fuentes means by this is that researchers should not talk about the evolution of individual
traits of species, such as human language, but instead that they need to understand the evolution of entire creatures, their behaviours, physiology and psychology, their niches, as well as their interaction with other species. Fuentes asserts that a full picture of human species engages the biological, the cultural and the psychological simultaneously as part of this extended evolutionary synthesis-based understanding. At the same time, Fuentes claims that current models of what culture is and how it interacts with the human psyche and body are poorly developed, at least in the sense that there is no broad consensus on what culture is. But there do seem to be components of culture and ways that such culture interacts with us. Many of the very traits and properties of the environment that we want to explain as part of language evolution are poorly defined, lacking widespread agreement on their meanings among the majority of specialists. For a theory of language evolution an understanding of the roles of society, culture and their interaction with individual cognitive functions is vital. Yet there is little agreement as to what any of these things mean. Although our bodies are a bit better understood, there are vast spaces of disagreement even about our physical make-up.
In order to better understand the factors of our environment that affect our evolution, it might help to start by defining the social environment, beginning with the elusive idea of ‘culture’. A theory of culture underlies an understanding of language evolution. In fact, there can be no adequate theory of language evolution without a sound theory of culture. One idea of culture (mine) is the following:
Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains and ranked values. Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment. The roles, knowledge and values of culture are only found in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members.1
How Language Began Page 8