There are several reasons to reject the idea that grammar is central to language. First, languages like Pirahã and Riau (Indonesia) are languages currently spoken that appear to lack any hierarchical grammar. Their ‘grammars’ are little more than words arranged like beads on a string, rather than structured as chunks within chunks.15 Second, there is a good deal of evidence that symbols evolved long before grammar in human linguistic history. Third, hierarchical grammars, when they are found, are little more than by-products. There are independent processing advantages of hierarchy well known in the computer science community, as Herbert Simon said. Hierarchical organisation aids tremendously in the processing and retrieval of any kind of information, not merely the information found in human languages. A fourth reason to reject the idea that any one type of structure is central to language is that non-human creatures appear to use syntax. But if this is true, ability to learn syntax is not exclusive to humans. Animals that use some form of linguistic structure include Alex the parrot and Koko the gorilla.# Their syntax is neither clearly hierarchical nor recursive, but they nonetheless employ structure-based understanding. Fifth, humans have evolved away from cognitive rigidity. Animals need instincts because they lack flexible cognition. But this is the opposite of the direction that human evolution has taken, towards language and cognitive flexibility rather than instinct-driven behaviour as found among other animals. What humans know and learn is based on local cultural and even environmental constraints.16 They are free to develop very different, non-genetically programmed structures. Similarities found across the world’s languages would tell us about how human communication works, not about human evolution or hardwiring of human language instincts.
What did Homo erectus invent, then? Symbols. And symbols are just a short hop away from language. Over time the form and meaning units of erectus would have been ordered and perhaps structured, eventually producing ever more advanced structures, as in modern languages. But how did humans do this when other creatures did not? The answer is easy. All of human invention and language is underwritten, shaped and enhanced by the human brain. And, in fair play, language paid its debt to the brain by helping the brain become more intelligent, placing cultural and sexual selectional pressures on humans to communicate better.
The evidence thus strongly supports the claim that Homo erectus possessed language: evidence of culture – values, knowledge structures and social organisation; tool use and improvement (however slowly, compared to Homo sapiens); exploration of the land and sea, going beyond what could be seen to what could be imagined; and symbols – in the forms of decorations and tools. Only language is able to explain the Homo erectus cognitive revolution.
Language evolved relatively rapidly after the appearance of the first symbols. But as the benefits of hominin communication grew, so did the evolutionary pressures to produce clearer sounds, longer discourses and more involved conversations. The story of the evolution of human language cannot be told fully without understanding how hominins evolved physiologically to support more complex and more efficient communication.
For this reason, we need to talk a bit about the evolution of our brains and vocal abilities.
* If Peircean scholars disagree with my interpretation, then this is where I must diverge slightly from Peirce.
† This last phrase is actually a slang expression that means that someone left in haste. During the time of the military dictatorship in Brazil, from 1964–1984, it was also a daring phrase because if caught without a ‘document’ (shorthand for the national identification card), a citizen could be arrested, and even tortured if they had the wrong political background.
‡ If there could have been Homo sapiens without language 50,000 years ago, the hypothesised time of the ‘Merge leap’ for Berwick and Chomsky, that is more or less when the ability to do recursion entered human brains and languages, then there is no reason that there still could not be pockets of humans without language, that is without recursive thought or expression. This seems like a strange prediction, but it should be easy enough to verify. Finding humans that not only lack but who are completely unable to understand or produce recursive language would be striking support for the UG/recursion theory of language origins.
§ There is no language which has meaning without convention. Yet conventions imply culture (see my Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2016) since they are general cultural agreements, such as word meanings. Finally, there is animal thought – if we say that language is structure-dependent and that it is a necessary condition for thought (as opposed to merely enhancing thought), then we are not only claiming that other hominins did not think, but that no other creature thinks, since other creatures lack the structure-building operation Chomsky proposes as the foundation of language, which he calls ‘Merge’.
¶ Like many of Peirce’s terms, ‘interpretant’ has many different potential meanings, including the concepts of how the term would be translated and how one would interpret it. I refer here to one small aspect of this complicated network of meanings that Peirce intended by this term. It means much more than what I discuss here.
# Koko is a female western lowland gorilla that has learned a good deal of American Sign Language. Her caregiver, Francine Patterson, claims that Koko can use as many as 1,000 signs accurately and that she can understand as many as 2,000 English words. Alex was an African grey parrot studied for over thirty years by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg. Alex was claimed to have reasoning and linguistic abilities equal to dolphins and great apes. Pepperberg claimed that Alex could indeed understand the recursive G3 language, English.
Part Two
Human Biological Adaptations for Language
5
Humans Get a Better Brain
SCARECROW: Do you think if I went with you this Wizard would give me some brains?
DOROTHY: I couldn’t say. But even if he didn’t, you’d be no worse off than you are now.
SCARECROW: Yes, that’s true.
The Wizard of Oz
IF SCARECROW WEREN’T a fictional character, he couldn’t have been simultaneously brainless and loquacious. Humans, of course, would not be able to engage in conversations without a brain. But one doubts that the poor, fictional Scarecrow understood what he was asking for. If he could talk without a brain, he was probably better off. This is because while brains are indeed the source of love, of sharing, of music and of beauty, of science and art, they are also the origins of terrorism, bigotry, war and machismo. The brain is simultaneously the reason for our greatest accomplishments and the source of our greatest failures as a species. But evolution doesn’t care about success or failure in the cultural sense and it certainly doesn’t care directly about evil or beauty. Evolution is about the physical survival of the fittest.
The hominin brain grew and developed for over 7 million years, from Sahelanthropus tchadensis to Homo sapiens, about 200,000 years ago. Then the growth and development seems to have stopped. There has been no clear evidence for evolution in Homo brain size since sapiens first left Africa. If Homo sapiens were smarter than Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis 200 millennia ago, why are humans no smarter today than those sapiens that first left Africa as the evidence suggests? This could be due to any number of factors. It may be that there hasn’t been enough time for the brain to have evolved since sapiens first appeared; 200,000 years is a short period of time in the sweep of evolutionary history. On the other hand, according to some theories Homo neanderthalensis emerged from Homo heidelbergensis in only 100,000 years.
An alternative theory, the ‘great leap forward’ theory, suggests that change has occurred in the last 50,000 years, due to the appearance of art and leaps in cultural evolution. But there is no compelling reason to suppose that this change in the archaeological record is the result of biological evolution. Cultural development and new experiences could have built up slowly, finally leading to breakthroughs that would have s
eemed miraculous to earlier generations (such as the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution). This is a time period long enough to have produced at least two or three such ‘great leaps’ in principle. So why is it that there seems to be no significant change in the brain for the past 200 millennia?
This apparent halt in human brain development is nothing to be ashamed of. It seems to be caused by the simple fact that life is good for our species. Homo sapiens have exploited a planet of plenty, through agriculture and technology, enjoying survival rates and quality of life that no other species has ever known. No other creature since time began has ridden the crest of the evolutionary wave as sapiens has, not even our human predecessors. Erectus and neanderthalensis never achieved cultural levels at which they could benefit from dentistry, science, relatively advanced medicine. They lacked the cultural resources to live with high mental and physical health and well-being. They lacked the intense innovation of sapiens. Was this the result of language? Did Homo sapiens have better language skills and therefore greater cultural accomplishments? The answer is, ‘It’s complicated.’
Language, as we have been seeing, is not that difficult, in spite of a long tradition going back to the 1950s telling us that it is extremely complicated, a veritable mystery. What we have seen, to the contrary, is that language is symbols and ordering at its core and that those are not tough ingredients to develop for brains like ours. On the other hand, having something to talk about can be hard. And that depends on both culture and individual intelligence. As Homo brains evolved and our intelligence as a species grew, it isn’t so much that language improved but our ability to use it did. Smarter people can put the same tool to better use. And, yes, they can improve it. But the crucial thing here is the intelligence that our larger brains gave us over erectus to think even more abstractly and to take the symbolism our erectus ancestors had given us and project this into art and our stories. Into tool technology and so on. The combination of language and greater intelligence, accumulating knowledge over time, would have been all that was needed to result eventually in the second cognition revolution of a thousand centuries ago as sapiens emerged from Africa.
This greater intelligence, as well as growing relative geographical rootedness found in anatomically modern humans, such as Cro-Magnon – early sapiens in Europe – would have allowed them to construct more intricate cultures through greater social specialisation. Hunter-gatherer societies are often perfect examples of political anarchy, in the sense that they have no political structure other than group consensus. That has its attraction. Such societies often lack priests, full-time musicians, carpenters and all other specialised professions. This is because the cultural challenges accepted by hunter-gatherers (what they think is worthwhile, what their environment allows them to do, how they have chosen to live their lives) simply afford little opportunity for specialisation. Specialisation requires a society to provide food or goods to members who produce non-food related services or goods for the society. If someone spends all day playing a musical instrument to make someone else feel happy, they are going to need some food when they’re done. But if no one gives them any, their music will stop while they plant a field instead of playing or singing. Language-enabled culture is the glue that holds the human cognitive colony together.
Once again, therefore, it is simplistic to suppose, as many researchers appear to, that the dramatically more complex cultural artefacts and social organisation of Homo sapiens relative to erectus or neanderthalensis are the result of language alone. Sapiens quite possibly have greater vocabularies and more complex grammars than other species of Homo had. The sapiens brain is better, but, more importantly, sapiens cultures and histories are richer. Sapiens have inherited much from other Homo species. They have incorporated ancient wisdom into sapiens cultures, languages and thinking. These accretions are in addition to all of the original developments, physical and cultural, by sapiens since they emerged from other species. Language has, of course, changed in the Homo genus over the past 1.9 million years or so. But a great deal of Homo biology has also changed. Erectus and others developed differently from the way in which we do.
Biological anthropologists have written on the different ‘life histories’ of Homo species. Sapiens develop more slowly than their Homo ancestors. Some of the life history distinctions between Homo species and other primates include longer pregnancies, longer periods of growth (sapiens infancy is longer, sapiens adolescence is longer, sapiens adulthood is longer than any other primate, including, apparently neanderthalensis and erectus). Humans have to live more slowly in order to live longer. This is common in the animal kingdom – slower growth usually means longer lives. Human biology confuses this simple picture a tad, however, because humans have very short periods between births, usually a feature of shorter-lived creatures. In this respect, humans are a cross between whales and rabbits.
If life history, brain growth and more nurturing as a result from parents, other kin and the culture at large also characterised part of the contrast between sapiens and, say, erectus, then these non-linguistic facts, already independently established in studies of biological anthropologists, could explain a great deal about the larger cultural and linguistic development of sapiens other than language. While there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that erectus lacked language, there is evidence that erectus were not as intelligent as sapiens and that they developed differently. But these points should not be confused. Homo species, including erectus, demonstrate several stages of brain evolution. By examining these stages, we get some idea of the advantages later species enjoyed over earlier ones.
Palaeoanthropologist Ralph Holloway and his colleagues proposed four major stages of hominin brain evolution based on years of research and study of the fossil record.1
Stage zero is the foundational stage, beginning with the split between chimpanzees and hominins. This stage extends back in time to Sahelanthropus, Ardipithecus and Orrorin, roughly 6–8 million years ago, when brains were marked by three characteristics that distinguish them from their descendants.
First, the lunate sulcus (crescent or moon-shaped groove in the brain) of these creatures is found further towards the front (anterior) portion of the brain. This groove divides the visual cortex from the frontal cortex. Since it is known that the frontal cortex of the brain is required for thinking, then, other things being equal, the larger this portion of the cortex, the better one can think. The position of the lunate sulcus is indicative of the relative thinking sophistication of the brain it is found in. Therefore, the further back the lunate sulcus is found, the reasoning goes, the more intelligent the animal.
Second, Sahelanthropus in all probability had a less-developed part of the brain dedicated to connecting multiple cerebral components. This portion is called the ‘posterior association cortex’. This area of the brain links multiple regions simultaneously, enabling faster thinking. The posterior association cortex lets us bring several parts of our brains to bear on a single problem simultaneously.
Finally, the brains of the first hominins were small, 350–450cm3 on average. This likely means that their smaller and more simply organised brains would have been incapable of anything like modern human thought.
The next phase, Holloway’s stage one, of hominin brain evolution began about 3.5 million years ago, with the appearance of Australopithecus africanus and afarensis. The lunate sulcus in these creatures has moved a bit further back, relative to its position in earlier hominins. This is known because of impressions of the interior of their fossil skulls (endocasts). The visual cortex of the australopithecines had shrunk while their frontal cortex was now larger. Cognition was building steam.
The posterior association cortex is also larger in australopithecines. Their overall brains show signs of reorganisation and more specialised areas are becoming evident, along with an expansion in size to around 500cm3.
Australopithecus cerebrums (the brain just under the cortex) show signs of asy
mmetry, with the left and right hemispheres taking on different specialisations. In modern humans this is very pronounced, leading to somewhat romanticised claims about ‘left-brained’ vs ‘right-brained’ personalities.
Hominin brains’ next evolutionary jump occurs about 1.9 million years ago with the appearance of Homo erectus. By this time, the hominin brain had got much larger and specialised – an unparalleled combination of cognitive firepower. Nothing had been seen like this in the 4 billion years of evolution prior to the appearance of Homo.
This coincides with stage two in Holloway’s scheme, marked by an overall increase in brain volume and encephalisation, accompanied by modern sapiens-like asymmetries (such as between left hemisphere for language and hearing from the right ear vs right hemisphere for hearing from the left ear and so on). At this stage, brains began to exhibit a prominent region around Broca’s area* important for sequential actions. They also probably had better language abilities. There would have also have been increased development after birth of each sapiens and improved social learning in areas such as toolmaking, hunting and so on.
In stage three, Holloway’s final stage that occurred about 500,000 years ago, the brain had reached its maximal size and refinement in specialisation for each hemisphere.
Therefore Homo erectus arrived on the scene with brain asymmetries typical of modern humans, such as a well-developed Broca’s region. This implies the existence of, or at least the possibility for, some form of language. This is not a surprise, of course, since apart from directly looking at the brain of erectus there is evidence from their cultural accomplishments that they had language. These features of the early Homo brain mean too that Homo infants took longer to reach full maturity, since brain cells require the longest time to mature. It can therefore be inferred from these changes that erectus was capable of social learning in hunting, collecting, scavenging and reproductive strategies.
How Language Began Page 13
