How Language Began

by Daniel L. Everett

  The societies of Homo erectus would have included criteria for membership in each community, the duties of each community member, relationships between members, such as children and adults, activity-planning and other needs.

  Perceptions and the range of thought are shaped significantly by a cultural network. This turns out to mean in European societies that the dualism of Descartes and the mind-as-computer idea of Alan Turing represent the core of cognition. But this seems misguided.

  Since the earliest days of artificial intelligence, eminent proponents of the idea that brains are computers have proposed, often quite emotionally, that of course machines can think. John McCarthy says the following: ‘To ascribe certain beliefs, knowledge, free will, intentions, consciousness, abilities, or wants to a machine or computer program is legitimate when such an ascription expresses the same information about the machine that it expresses about a person.’1

  But this kind of statement is built on a faulty understanding of beliefs as well as a faulty understanding of culture. And the personification of computers by attributing beliefs and so on to them one often hears suggested is too powerful. It could be extended in humorous, but no less valid, ways to circumstances no one would ascribe beliefs to. One could say that a thermostat believes it is too hot so it turns on the air-conditioning. Or that toes curl up because they believe it is warm. Or that plants turn towards the sun, because they believe they should. In fact, there are many cultures, the Pirahã’s and Wari’s, in which beliefs are regularly ascribed to animals, to clouds, to trees and so on as a convenient way of talking. But the tribes I have worked with don’t usually mean these ascriptions literally.

  Beliefs are states which occur when bodies (including brains) are directed towards something, from an idea to a plant. Beliefs are formed by the individual as she or he engages in language and culture.

  As one contemplates erectus culture, values, beliefs and social roles, some subsidiary issues come to mind: the role and emergence of tools in any culture. How is one to characterise tools culturally, things that are used to aid individual cultural members in different tasks? Tools are dripping with cultural knowledge. One could even conceive of tools as congealed culture. Examples include physical tools, such as shovels, paintings, hats, pens, plates and food. But also non-physical tools are crucial. Perhaps humans’ most important tool is language. In fact, culture itself is a tool.

  The tool-like nature of language can be seen easily in its stories. Stories are used to exhort, to explain, to describe and so on, and each text is embedded in a context of dark matter. Stories, including books, are, of course, unlike physical tools in the sense that as linguistic devices they could in principle have revealed something about the dark matter from which they partially emerge, though generally very little is conveyed. And the reason for that is clear. People talk about what they assume their interlocutor does not know (but has the necessary background knowledge to understand). And tacit knowledge, or dark matter, which people are usually unaware of, is simply overlooked.

  That language as a tool is also seen in the forms of stories. Consider a list of principles that anthropologist Marvin Harris provided to account for the Hindu rules governing defecation in Indian rural areas:

  A spot must be found not too far from the house.

  The spot must provide protection against being seen.

  It must offer an opportunity to see any one approaching.

  It should be near a source of water for washing.

  It should be upwind of unpleasant odours.

  It must not be in a field with growing crops.2

  The first line uses the indefinite article ‘a.’ In the second line the definite article ‘the’ is used. From that point onward, ‘spot’ is pronominalised as ‘it’. This is because of English conventions for keeping track of a topic through a discourse. The indefinite article indicates that the noun it modifies is new information. The definite shows that it is shared information. The pronoun reveals that it is topical. As the single word is referenced and re-referenced throughout the discourse its changing role and relationship to shared knowledge is marked with specific grammatical devices. This is shared but unspoken and largely ineffable knowledge to the non-specialist.

  How does the understanding of culture promoted here compare to the wider understanding of culture in a society as a whole? It is common to hear about ‘American culture’, ‘Western values’, or even ‘pan-human values’ and so forth. According to the theory of dark matter and culture developed above these are perfectly sensible ideas, so long as we interpret them to mean ‘overlapping values, rankings, roles and knowledge’, rather than a complete homogeneity of (any notion of) culture throughout a given population. From laws to pronunciation, from architecture to music to sexual positions and body shape, the actions of individual humans as members of communities (‘likers of Beethoven’, ‘eaters of haggis’ and on and on) in conjunction with an individual’s apperceptions and episodic memory – all are the products of overlapping dark matters.

  Just so, values can produce in an individual or in a community a sense of mission – such as the Boers, the Zionists, the American frontiersmen and settlers who subscribed to manifest destiny, or the National Socialists who dreamed of a thousand-year Reich. This sense of mission and purpose is what many businesses are after today as the use of the term culture has been adopted by companies as ‘what they are all about’. Did erectus communities have any sense of mission?

  Although there are most certainly general principles of human behaviour and the formation of dark matter, the combination of individual apperceptions with exposure to mere subsets of larger value, knowledge and role networks means that no two people will be exactly alike in any way. And certainly no two cultures will be.

  There are better examples of knowledge that is unspoken, though. Non-human animals present superior examples in some ways. These animals have beliefs, desires and emotions, learn complicated behaviours and ways of interacting with the world. Yet they lack language altogether and so, by definition, cannot talk about their knowledge. Almost all non-human animal knowledge is therefore dark matter. Most people wave their hands at these fascinating phenomena, sweeping them all under the label of ‘instincts’ rather than knowledge.

  Dogs, humans and other animals go through an attachment period, are driven by emotions, learn tricks, learn to obey a range of commands, come to sense ownership/relationship/belonging to certain items in their environment and so on. My 140-pound Fila Brasileiro barks when even slight changes are added to the environment – a stack of books in a strange place, cushions from the sofa piled for cleaning, a new car in the driveway and so on. While my dog cannot ‘tell’ me about this in English, through her barking and body posture she communicates relatively well, though many of her actual feelings remain ineffable. Her dark matter in this sense has both ‘communicable’ (via actions and barking) and ineffable components, just as human dark matter does. Erectus, like sapiens, would have learned their languages through interaction with other members of their community, especially their mothers.

  Still other cultural conventions include queuing. In an American store no matter how crowded, most people will, without being instructed, form a queue in front of the cash register. In some countries, without rigorous enforcement, such queuing will not occur – everyone will crowd around the cash register hoping to get served first. Queuing is thus a convention of some cultures but not others. And, as with all conventions, when we experience another culture, we will always be bothered by the absence of our culture’s conventions. The reason is that conventions make life easier by requiring fewer decisions, by bringing a sense of the familiar to the foreign.

  Societies depend on conventions to be able to function. It is likely that erectus communities began to develop conventions. Who speaks first when two people meet? How do children get food in the presence of adults? Who is the first one to depart the village on a new journey? Philosopher Ruth Millikan claims tha
t conventions share a range of properties, such as being able to be reproduced, the need for a precedent before something can become a convention, usefulness in organising actions (such as forming lines at the box office instead of everyone crowding around at once).3 She also notes that we can all violate conventions for different reasons and effects, just as Grice observed that we can flout conversational maxims. Millikan asserts that all people want, expect and seek conventions, such as using a bag to hold a seat in a waiting room.

  The discussion of the importance of conventions and the individual to culture leads to an understanding of culture as the core of cognition. The argument is that without culture there can be no semantic understanding, no background, no tacit knowledge to undergird new thought.

  Erectus societies had culture. From the very first, humans, with their larger brains and new experiences, built up values, knowledge and social roles that allowed them to wander the earth, sail the seas and build the first communities in the history of the earth. And from these cultures built more than 60,000 generations ago we emerged. Our debt to Homo erectus is inestimable. They were not cavemen. They were men, women and children, the first humans to speak and to live in culturally linked communities.

  * Out of many, one.

  † The idea that the expansion of the United States throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable.

  ‡ Obviously DNA studies would be interesting and necessary scientifically before saying anything with confidence on this score, but it is difficult politically to carry out such studies because in Brazil those delegated to protect indigenous peoples are wary of anything that could be perceived as racist studies, especially studies carried out by ‘gringo’ scientists.

  Conclusion

  That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

  Genesis 11:9

  MORE THAN 60,000 GENERATIONS AGO, Homo erectus introduced language into the world. Not merely another form of animal communication, language is an advanced form of cultural expression, based on abilities unique to human cognition along with general principles of structure for information transfer.

  The core of language is the symbol, a combination of a culturally agreed upon form with a culturally developed meaning. Human perceptual constraints and thinking limitations guide this process, but it is largely the output of human societies, their values, their knowledge and their social structures.

  The symbol may have resulted from associating two objects by mistake, such as a tree root confused with a serpent, or simply by regular association of one thing in the world with another object or event, as Pavlov’s dog learned to associate food with the ringing of a bell. Once this connection was made, humans began to use their symbols, each one learning from the other. Since communication is an effort of the entire being, gestures, intonation, the lungs, the mouth, the tongue, the hands, body movements and even eyebrows were marshalled for use in language, just as they are in much other animal communication. These different components of our communicative effort in language would have broken symbols down into smaller and smaller parts as they also were used to build them into larger and larger units. Speech sounds, words, sentences, grammatical affixes and tones all emerged from the initial invention of the symbol, with the invention being improved and spreading over time by total societal involvement, just as all other inventions are. Meaningless elements (sounds like ‘s’, ‘a’ and ‘t’) were combined to form meaningful items (such as the word ‘sat’) and duality of patterning emerged, itself leading next to three types of grammar. The first kind of grammar, G1, is little more than symbols arranged in rows like beads on a string: ‘Eat food. Man. Woman.’ Or even, ‘I see you. You see me?’ The next language type, G2, arranges symbols linearly (in a row), just like a G1 grammar, and hierarchically – combining symbols inside of other symbols, just as many modern European languages do. The third type of grammar, G3, does everything that the other types do, but with the added property of recursion, the ability to put one thing inside another thing of the same type without end. Language as a matryoshka doll. All three types of languages are still found in the world. All are fully functioning human languages appropriate for different cultural niches. Homo erectus communities spoke one or all of these types of grammars, in their far-flung outposts around the world.

  Human languages change over time and cultures and speakers elaborate them in some places and simplify them in others. Contemporary languages are therefore different in their details from those of 2 million years ago. But the fact remains that 2 million years ago in Africa, a Homo erectus community began to share information among its members by means of language. They were the first to say, ‘It’s over there,’ or, ‘I am hungry.’ Maybe the first to say, ‘I love you.’

  Erectus communities were unlike sapiens communities in many ways. But they were nevertheless societies of human beings discussing, deliberating, debating and denouncing, as they travelled the world and bequeathed to us their invention, language.

  Each human alive enjoys their grammar and society because of the work, the discoveries and the intelligence of Homo erectus. Natural selection took those things that were most effective for human survival and improved the species until today humans live in the Age of Innovation, the Era of Culture, in the Kingdom of Speech.

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  Dediu, Dan and Steven C. Levinson. ‘On the Antiquity of Language: The Reinterpretation of Neanderthal Linguistic Capacities and Its Consequences’. Frontiers in Psychology, 5 July 2013. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397.