The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (2 page)

I
n the popular imagination, evolution is a clean arc from rock hammer through arrowhead to Pentium processor. It’s an inevitable outcome of one of those vague principles of life: the superior somehow unfolds out of the inferior. Likewise, language evolution begins with the urgent grunting of a guy with a club, moves through a “Me Tarzan, you Jane” phase, and ends finally with the epitome of civilization—the whip-crack enunciation of Sir Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.

For a long time the scientific account of language evolution wasn’t that dissimilar to the popular version. Researchers sketched only a broad-stroke picture in which the complex somehow inevitably arose from the simple. Some thought, for example, that prior to
Homo sapiens’
current brilliance with words there existed a protolanguage, a clever form of communication that distinguished us in crucial ways from our fellow primates. But how did this protolanguage and the systems that followed it arise? Did a single genetic mutation shape the destiny of man? Or was it a slow layering of change over countless generations that propelled us from grunt to nominative case and from screech to sonnet—not to mention haiku, the
OED,
six thousand distinct languages, and words like “love,” “fuck,” “nothingness,” “Clydesdale,” and “aquanaut”? There are no easy answers.

Of all the formidable obstacles to solving this mystery, the first lies in the nature of the spoken word. For all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is little more than air. It exits the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the atmosphere. On the evolutionary timescale, bone can last long enough to leave an impression, enabling us to track, for example, the adaptations that shaped 150 million years of ichthyosaurs. We can now see from the fossil evidence how these ocean dwellers changed over time, ballooning from a half meter into four-meter monsters, lengthening their spectacular snouts, and evolving fins and flukes from lizard bodies, before vanishing from the earth forever. But there are no verbs preserved in amber, no ossified nouns, and no prehistoric shrieks forever spread-eagled in the lava that took them by surprise.

Writing is a kind of fossil and so can tell us a little about the languages that have been recorded since it was invented. While it shares a lot with spoken language, including most of its words and much organizational structure, writing cannot be considered the bare bones of speech, for it is something else entirely. Writing is static, structured by the conventions of punctuation and the use of space. The kinds of sentences that occur in writing bear only an indirect relationship to the more free-flowing and complex structures of speech. Writing has no additional channels for avoiding ambiguity, as speech has with intonation and gesture. And writing is only six thousand years old.

In the absence of petrified words, evidence of change in language-related body parts offers a compelling clue to the course of language evolution. The brain, the tongue, the larynx, the lungs, the nose, and the uvula—the pendulous flap that swings in the throat of screaming Looney Tunes characters—are all intimately involved in speech production. But on the geologic timescale, soft tissue doesn’t last much longer than a sound wave. It leaves traces only in very peculiar cases, like the skin of a thirty-thousand-year-old mammoth stalled in Siberian permafrost or the famous prehistoric iceman, a five-thousand-year-old mummy naturally preserved in an alpine glacier on the Italian-Austrian border.

For a long time the closest we could get to language-related fossils were the impressions left by the bones of distant ancestors. Scientists gained some useful information by interpreting cranial remnants, since skull size is an interesting, if indirect, measure of brain volume. Assumptions about the language skills of our forebears can also be made when considering the length of the neck vertebrae and the progression of other skeletal changes over time.

But the size of a skull or a femur takes you only so far. It doesn’t tell you when the first word was uttered. Nor does it tell you if it was a noun like “tiger,” a verb like “eat,” or an imperative—“Run!” Bones can’t tell you who said the first word or who was listening. Did language begin as a soliloquy, or is the fundamental nature of language to be communicative? A conversation requires at least two people—but how could someone invent language at exactly the same time that someone else figured out how to decode it? Fossils cannot answer this question.

Only very recently have scientists begun to work out how language evolved. But in the same way that no single fossil can provide an answer, no one researcher can solve this problem, which is fundamentally awesome and multifaceted. There will be no Einstein of linguistic evolution, no single grand theory of the emergence of language. Unearthing the earliest origins of words and sentences requires the combined knowledge of half a dozen different disciplines, hundreds of intelligent, dedicated researchers, and a handful of visionary individuals. Finding out how language started requires technology that was invented last week and experiments that were conducted yesterday. It also needs simple basic experiments that have never been done before.

It was only four centuries ago that electricity was discovered. A century later the principles of internal combustion were worked out and the engine was created. In the twentieth century we invented the computer, discovered DNA, split the atom, sent
Voyager 1
into the outermost regions of the solar system, and unraveled the human genome. It is only now that we are getting to the really difficult questions. Piecing together several million years of linguistic evolution without a single language fossil is not just a cross-discipline, multidimensional treasure hunt; it’s the hardest problem in science today.
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This book tells two intertwined stories about language evolution. The first is an account of how it happened, the twenty-first century’s best guess at humanity’s oldest mystery: how the fundamental processes of evolutionary change spiraled together to produce an ape with protolanguage and, eventually, a linguistic primate—us. The second story is about what prompted a group of scientists to start asking questions about language evolution at this point in time. As with all scientific tales, it is a parable about humility and hubris, about progress and intellectual folly. It begins with a basic uncertainty about the validity of even studying how language evolved—think of this tale as the evolution of a doubt. The doubt began to nag at certain individuals thousands of years ago, and it has flourished over the years to concern many people in modern times. It has taken different forms: like Did language evolve at all? Is this question scientific? and Even if it is scientific, can we ever answer it? If you picked just one of these questions and followed its threads, you would soon find yourself tangled in a bloody thicket: Is the study of language a science? What counts as scientific evidence? Is language what makes us unique? What is language, anyway? What, in God’s name, is science?

For me, this part of the story began in an introductory linguistics lecture in the early 1990s at the University of Melbourne. I can clearly remember my frustration when, after asking the lecturer about the origin of language, I was told that linguists don’t explore this topic: we don’t ask the question, because there is no definitive way to answer it.

That response made no sense to me—surely the origin of language was the central mystery of linguistics. After all, unlike any other trait, language is the foundation of our identity as individuals and as a species. As I later learned, the search for the origins of language was formally banned from the ivory tower in the nineteenth century and was considered disreputable for more than a century. The explanation given to me in a lecture hall in late-twentieth-century Australia had been handed down from teacher to student for the most part unchallenged since 1866, when the Société de Linguistique of Paris declared a moratorium on the topic. These learned gentlemen decreed that seeking the origins of language was a futile endeavor because it was impossible to prove how it came about. Publication on the subject was banned.

Today, nearly twenty years since my Linguistics 101 class, the field of language evolution is burgeoning. Important conferences on the topic occur regularly, with more announced each year. Journals are starting up, and books and collections of essays about language origins are published in increasing numbers. While fewer than one hundred academic studies of language evolution were published in the 1980s, more than one thousand have been published since.
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Indeed, entirely new fields of science, like the digital modeling of language evolution, have been created.

Clues to the origin and development of the language suite have been found in areas as diverse as brain damage, the way that children speak, the way that chimpanzees point, and the genes of mice. Advances in the biology of language, artificial intelligence, genetics, animal cognition, and anthropology in the late twentieth century have shown scientists how previously uncharted mental and neural territory can now be explored. A lot of the research in these areas traces its roots to well before 1990, but since then there has been a winnowing around the question of language. What’s more, an abundance of new evidence has been uncovered, introducing significant challenges to old methods and theories. In turn, this upwelling of interest and work has led to a greater synthesis between different projects in fields like linguistics, anthropology, genetics, and even physics. The fundamental goal of this book is to highlight with each chapter one of the moments or ideas that has given scientists compelling reasons to explore language evolution.

Part 1 of
The First Word
traces a broad historical arc through the lives of people intrigued by language origins, from King Psammetichus in ancient Egypt to Charles Darwin in nineteenth-century England. Darwin, of course, is best known for formulating the theory of evolution by natural selection, noting to great consequence that “the crust of the earth is a vast museum.”
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He had some very definite ideas about the evolution of language.

More recently, four figures bear much of the responsibility for the current state of the art. The first and most influential of these is Noam Chomsky, who went from being an exceptionally smart graduate student writing about the grammar of Hebrew to one of the most powerful intellectuals in history. The story of language evolution studies is unavoidably the story of the intellectual reign of Noam Chomsky. It is as much about his influence and what people think he said as it is about what he actually did say. Second is Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who has taught a nonhuman how to use language. Third is Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive scientist who has written a number of influential and bestselling books about language and the mind. Finally, Philip Lieberman of Brown University, another cognitive scientist, started out at MIT as Chomsky’s student and has since taken his experiments on language to the flanks of Everest and back. For this introductory history, think of Chomsky and Savage-Rumbaugh as poles in the debate, with Lieberman and Pinker somewhere in the vast middle. Between the extremes, there has been a collision of two completely different ways of seeing ourselves.

The first view, solidly anchored in popular linguistic theory, holds that language is a uniquely human phenomenon, distinct from the adaptations of all other organisms on the planet. Species as diverse as eagles and mosquitoes fly, whales and minnows swim, but we are the only species that communicates like we do. Not only does language differentiate us from all other animal life; it also exists separate from other cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and even the act of speech itself. Researchers in this tradition have searched for a “language organ,” a part of the brain devoted solely to linguistic skills. They have sought the roots of language in the fine grain of the human genome, maintaining, in some cases, that certain genes may exist for the sole purpose of encoding grammar. One evolutionary scenario in this view maintains that modern language exploded onto the planet with a big genetic bang, the result of a fortuitous mutation that blessed the Cro-Magnon with the gift of tongues.

In the alternate view, a David to the Chomskyan Goliath, language is not a singular phenomenon or a specific thing. Rather, it is multidimensional—interdependent and interconnected with other human abilities and other cognitive tasks. Speech, for example, is crucial to language. And because we have a common ancestor, there is a strong family connection between our complex linguistic skills and the simple word and syntax skills that chimpanzees can acquire. Indeed, though our language system is unique, the progressive nature of language evolution also reveals an intimate relationship between our linguistic skills and the abilities of less closely related animals, like monkeys and parrots. Language is accordingly a higher cognitive function—one that emerges from multiple sites and operations in the brain. In this view, language is not a monolithic thing that we
have;
rather, it is a thing that we
do
. It arises from the coordination of many genetic settings; these are expressed as a set of physical, perceptual, and conceptual biases that underlie certain abilities and behaviors, all of which allow us to learn language.

Humans, in this view, are not so much unique and blessed geniuses, apes with that extra something special. Rather, we are special but also in key respects very much the same—which makes us not so much a higher species as the earth’s idiots savants, narrowly and accidentally brilliant, juggling symbols like there is no tomorrow and nothing else to do. Some of the most radical proponents of this perspective think of language itself as an organism, one that evolves to suit its own needs.