Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans

by Bickerton, Derek

  So the real breakthrough into language had to be displacement, rather than arbitrariness. Whatever achieved displacement would do the trick. And iconic signs would work, because in that particular context, with us waving and screaming and pointing “Thataway!,” the elephant noise or the hippo noise or whatever it was could have only one meaning: dead megabeast, food for the taking only a short march away.

  A SPECIES DOES WHAT IT HAS TO DO

  So, back on the savanna, we’re recruiting everyone we can.

  Including females? You bet. Why not?

  The main reason why not is the back-projection fallacy. Among the few hunter-gatherers left in the modern world, men hunt and women gather. Among chimpanzees, females do hunt occasionally but it’s mostly the males that do it. So, the easy way to reconstruct our past is to draw a straight line from chimps to humans and assume that our ancestors slavishly followed that line. If females hunted a little in the beginning and don’t hunt at all now, women’s hunting must have decreased smoothly and gradually through all of the intervening millennia.

  This, of course, is just one aspect of the basic ladder model of evolution that, no matter how often it’s dissed and dismissed, continues its subterranean life in the thinking even of many who would overtly disavow it. Everything’s a precursor of something else, more often than not of us. Everything is still headed for the pinnacle, and we’re it.

  But in fact, whatever living organisms do is determined by the circumstances they’re in, not what some Designer designs for them, or even what some mysterious long-term evolutionary trend tells them to do. There’s a saying among Scottish country dancers that if you’re not sure of the next figure, “The music will tell you what to do.” It’s totally false, of course. But in evolution, the niche will tell you what to do, and that’s gospel, you’ll do it, because your genes are more flexible than you think and can express themselves in a wide variety of ways.

  And in any case, we’re not talking about hunting. We’re talking about high-end scavenging, power scavenging, and scavenging of any kind is something apes hardly ever do—certainly never on the scale our ancestors did it. Power scavenging requires whatever strategies are appropriate for it: in this case, big numbers. And to go in without the women, at least all the women who aren’t currently pregnant or minding babies and toddlers, would be like tying one hand behind our back.

  Imagine we’ve now alerted all forty members of our group and they in turn have alerted a few dozen members of other neighboring groups. We’re heading back, now, close to a hundred of us converging on the site. And as we go, we’re picking up flakes and hand axes.

  Something that has long puzzled paleontologists is the enormous number of hand axes that have been discovered. No matter what they were used for, there seem to be far more than would ever be needed.

  Why were there so many? Why are they found scattered over the landscape, and why do so many of them show so few signs that they were ever used? The conventional wisdom says they were a chopping tool, used mainly in butchery. Some believe that they were projectiles used in hunting. Some think they were a form of sexual display, made to impress females with their maker’s skill. Of course they could have been all these things. But why are there so many, and why are they so little used, and why are they found in so many places?

  Suppose one of their principal uses was to drive off the competition at large-carcass sites?

  You don’t know where the next large carcass would turn up, so you scatter some over the territory and dump others in strategically located caches. Whenever you have spare time you make more and just throw them down or carry them where they might be needed. Then when the call comes you can pick up a half dozen or so, carry four or five in your left hand and the crook of your arm and one in the right hand ready for use. If fifty of you do that, that’s near enough three hundred projectiles—aerodynamically functional ones, too, as William Calvin pointed out. He thought they were used primarily in hunting, and from time to time they probably were, but they were also sharp and heavy enough to do serious damage to competing scavengers.

  It’s the men that do this. The women pick up a single hand ax each and a sharp flint flake or two. They’re going to be doing the butchering.

  What? Women butchers? But that’s a man’s job!

  Not necessarily. Look at the logic of it. Men are expendable; any man can make a woman fertile. Women are the womb-carriers, the future. If I get killed, my genes will go on in you and your babies. So I’ll fight off the beasts while you butcher—it’s the only option that makes evolutionary sense.

  The site’s coming into view now, and nothing much seems to have changed, except there’s maybe even more competition than before. The afternoon is already well advanced. By dark we’ll be done or we’ll be dead.

  It’s showtime.

  We men go out front, a rough semicircle with the women inside it, more men than women because some women are tied down with kids, back in one of our refuges. Beasts on the nearer side of the carcass stir restlessly, start growling. They still haven’t gotten used to this new species that does stuff no species did before. They’re not sure how to handle us. We start screaming, in unison. Then we start throwing.

  The stones aren’t big enough to kill large animals, but they’re big enough, when propelled with all the force of an arm and shoulder, to knock out an eye or break a big carnivore’s leg. A half-blind carnivore or one with a broken leg probably won’t live long. It will be weeks, if ever, before a break heals enough for the animal to hunt again. Chances of infection are high. There are no thought bubbles over the carnivores’ heads, but inside them, unconscious cost-benefit analyses are going on. They start to back off, snarling. Except one, enraged by a hit, who hurls himself at us.

  Two of us go down. The saber-tooth has a grip on the neck of one. It twists him and disembowels him with one rake of its hind claws. We pile on, throwing from shorter and shorter ranges, darting in and leaping back. The saber-tooth reels, recoils, drags itself off with both back legs broken. By now we’re all around the carcass—the women are climbing it, they’re cutting, blood and lymph oozing from the cuts, and the beasts go wild at the smell. Three more of us go down in their first charge, the three who weren’t quick enough backing away from them. At least one won’t get up again, but several of the beasts now are limping or have bleeding cuts. The saber-tooth we hammered earlier has stopped and sunk down, hurt worse than we thought, and in a lightning turnaround the other beasts are onto it, working out their frustration and hunger, tearing it apart.

  Now it’s a standoff. Every time they make a move toward us we start screaming and throwing again. And the women are working fast, going for the best meat, hacking out chunks, smashing through bone where they have to, piling the chunks on the ground beneath, ready for transport.

  The trick is, don’t be too greedy; leave enough so the beasts won’t follow us when we leave.

  There’s no particular order to it, we’re not that organized yet—order will have to wait on language. A woman hefts a big hunk of meat and starts running with it. Others follow. We men start backing up. The beasts are reenergized. Some of them start to come after us. We run, throw, turn, run, throw again. We’re almost out of stones. The other beasts are scaling the carcass, plunging into the clefts we’ve made in it, ripping out dinner. The ones following us slow down, their cost-benefit analyses still ticking. Before them is meat they’d have to fight for and might not get even then; behind them is meat that won’t run but won’t be there for long if they don’t hurry back. No contest. By the end of the first mile, we’re on our own.

  We have food enough for all of us, several days’ worth at least.

  And we got all of that with just the smallest possible bit of language!

  WHY LANGUAGE HAD TO START THIS WAY

  The scenario I’ve just described is not original (except maybe for the way I told it). A number of paleontologists have described aspects of it, even down to the need for recruitment
. For instance, James O’Connell, chair of anthropology at the University of Utah, and his colleagues wrote a nice recruitment scenario into a paper that (despite optimal foraging theory, despite evidence from guts and teeth, despite the fact that traditional primate foods were vanishingly scarce at the high point of savanna expansion) still insisted that meat formed only a small part of our ancestors’ diet. In other words, even opponents of large-scale meat-eating have to accept the logic of this situation:

  “Neither would transport of parts [of dead megafauna] to ‘central places’ be indicated . . . ; individuals or groups may simply have called attention to any carcass they encountered or acquired, just as do modern hunters . . . If the carcass had not yet been taken, the crowd so drawn could have done so, then consumed it on or near the spot, again just as modern hunters sometimes do” (my italics).

  O’Connell wasn’t into language evolution; he was looking at foraging behavior and diet, which makes his endorsement of the key ingredient in the forging of language all the more compelling.

  But the question we now have to deal with is whether what I’ve proposed meets all the conditions listed in the first chapter—the conditions that any adequate theory of language evolution has to satisfy. Let’s look at each condition in turn.

  • The selective pressure had to be strong.

  This condition pretty well narrows things down to the only two pressures that determine whether life will go on at all: sex and subsistence. The pressure here involves subsistence, and it operated on a species whose existence as a savanna forager was highly precarious. If our ancestors hadn’t stumbled into high-end scavenging, they’d probably have shared the fate of every other previous and contemporary species in our branch of the evolutionary bush, certainly that of the bone-crunching species garhi and habilis. They’d have gone extinct; you and I would never have existed. Think of a stronger pressure than that.

  • The selective pressure had to be unique.

  Since no other species above the hymenoptera (excluding maybe ravens) has taken even a step as basic as the one I just described in the direction of language, we can assume that no other species experienced this particular pressure. And indeed, outside those I just mentioned, I know of no other species that has faced a subsistence problem that could be solved only through recruitment.

  • The very first use of language had to be fully functional.

  Well, you could hardly have anything more functional than what I’ve proposed here. One word or sign, plus a gesture or two, would trigger a series of events with profound consequences for the immediate future of the group that produced it. In contrast, virtually all the other proposals for language evolution require a minimum of several units (protowords and/or protosigns), more likely dozens or even hundreds, to achieve any result at all. If the first one or three or five protolanguage signs didn’t have a substantial payoff, no one would have bothered to invent any more.

  • The theory mustn’t conflict with anything in the ecology of ancestral species.

  I don’t think it does. What more can I say? Our prehistory is a contentious field—how could it be otherwise when so many things we’d like to know remain unknown, and so many people from so many disciplines try to work in it, each with their own background and their own agenda? Who knows, tomorrow may bring some discovery that will change everything. But don’t hold your breath.

  • The theory must explain why cheap signals should be believed.

  To make a noise like an elephant is not very energy-expensive. Why should anyone believe the message that it carries, when so little effort has gone into producing it?

  Well, because of rapid confirmation (or disconfirmation). In the case of most of the kinds of message other theories propose for early language—gossip, politicking, sexual advertising, or whatever—it’s hard, maybe even impossible, for the recipient to check whether the message is an honest one or simply part of the conning, the fakery, the exaggeration of one’s own talents to which all primates, and perhaps we more than any, are prone. This case is quite different. Either there’s a dead deinotherium over the hill, or there isn’t. In a couple of hours you’ll know. If anyone’s been foolhardy enough to fake a message, you can kick his or her ass. If not, there’s a bonanza of food there for you, enough incentive to make you a believer when the call comes again.

  • Finally, the theory must overcome primate selfishness.

  One of the big problems facing any exchange of information is, why exchange any information at all? Why tell anyone something that might give them an advantage over you? Why not keep any useful information for yourself, and exploit it for your own benefit?

  Exchanging information about the scavenging of megafauna is one case that overcomes this problem. If I don’t tell others about the dead deinotherium, there’s no benefit. I can’t exploit it for myself alone. I get the benefit only if I can persuade others to help me, and I can only get others to help me by giving them information. If we cooperate, we all gain; if not, we all lose.

  No previous theory of language evolution satisfies all these conditions.

  But that’s still not the best part of the story. The best part of the story is that it gives us cooperation for free.

  Human cooperation has long been a puzzle for anthropologists. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson put it like this:

  Our Miocene primate ancestors presumably cooperated only in small groups mainly made up of relatives like contemporary non-human primates . . . Over the next 5 to 10 million years something happened that caused humans to cooperate in large groups. The puzzle is: what caused this radical divergence from the behavior of other social mammals? Did some unusual evolutionary circumstance cause humans to be less selfish than other creatures?

  But, like all anthropologists before them, they don’t seem able to think of any “unusual evolutionary circumstances.” No surprise there: the straight-line theory of human development reigns supreme in anthropology as in linguistics; apes supposedly morphed smoothly and straightforwardly into humans with never a jink or a detour. Accordingly, old and inadequate explanations are constantly recycled: cooperation must have sprung from an extension of reciprocal altruism, from special effects of culture or language, or (last resort of the baffled) from some mixture of the above with other, unnamed factors.

  As you may have guessed by now, nobody’s quicker than I to attribute anything uniquely human to language. But this is one case in which language won’t cut it. Imagine taking any primate species and giving them language, but not cooperation. All you’d get would be a species of screaming wannabe bosses and back-talking don’t-wannabe subordinates.

  In almost all other species, including primates and other human ancestors, subsistence could be obtained without non-kin cooperation. Foraging, gathering, even hunting could be carried on by individuals or small kin groups. Only a species that came to depend (not completely, of course, but substantially) on accessing giant carcasses would have been obliged to recruit non-kin—obliged, because if non-kin did not cooperate with one another, nobody got anything. And only a long period (probably hundreds of thousands of years) of such activity would have been sufficient for the drive to cooperate to become, in humans, almost as strong as the drive to compete.

  On the face of it, recruitment for carcass-exploitation could, initially, have done little more than crack the prison walls of the here and now between which all other primates, for all their intelligence, were confined. But a small crack can have huge consequences. One of the basic tenets of chaos theory is that “small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the system.” The behavior of our power-scavenging ancestors was surely a nonlinear dynamical system. And, as the closing chapters of this book will show, the creation of protowords may have been enough, alone, in and of itself, to trigger the “large variations in the long-term behavior” of that system that would eventually give us full language, human cognition, and (almos
t) unlimited power over earth and all its other species.

  However, there is an alternative story.

  In all fairness to you, I must tell it. It comes from the person who is, in the opinion of many, the greatest living linguist, even the greatest linguist who’s ever lived, and it was first published in a source with the highest reputation for scientific accuracy. So before I finish my story, let’s look at Noam Chomsky’s take on language evolution.

  9

  THE CHALLENGE

  FROM CHOMSKY

  A DISCLAIMER

  Before I start to deal with Chomsky’s theory of language evolution, one thing has to be made clear.

  There is a widespread industry in the behavioral sciences that you might call “vulgar anti-Chomskyanism.” I guess it’s just what happens to everyone who gets to be top of a heap; it’s great for the ego if you can take them down. But beyond that, Chomsky in particular has been the target of vicious criticism because he is seen to embody one side of a dire rift in modern thinking—the rift between people who (like Chomsky) believe human nature is largely determined by biological factors and people who believe human nature is largely determined by human culture, which in turn has largely broken free from biological constraints. This, like any other scientific debate that involves our species, generates far more heat than light. Luckily for Chomsky, few on the opposite side are as smart as he is. Most of them simply misunderstand him, willfully in some cases. And as far as the rest are concerned, he’s a master polemicist; he can more than hold his own with them.