1. This is all discussed engagingly in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book, The Gene: An Intimate History (New York: Scribner, 2016).
Chapter 2: The Fossil Hunters
1. Daniel Lieberman’s The Evolution of the Human Head (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) is an excellent discussion of the evolution of the human head and its implications for human cognition. A good deal of the discussion of this chapter comes directly from my own Language: The Cultural Tool (London/New York: Profile/Vintage, 2012).
2. This is discussed in two relatively recent books, Fire: The Spark that Ignited Human Evolution, by Frances D. Burton (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press) and Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
3. Platforms are discussed at length in my Language: The Cultural Tool.
4. Robert W. Lurz, Mindreading Animals: The Debate Over What Animals Know About Other Minds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
5. To cite just a few, Robert Lurz’s Mindreading Animals; Sue Taylor Parker, Robert W. Mitchell and H. Lyn Miles (eds), The Mentalities of Gorillas and Orangutans: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Daria Maestripieri’s edited volume Primate Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina (New York: Holt, 2015; this book is designed for the general, non-specialist reader); and The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
6. Paul M. Churchland, Plato’s Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. 22.
Chapter 4: Everyone Speaks Languages of Signs
1. Taken from my Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
2. Searle’s 1972 review in the New York Review of Books of Chomsky’s revolution: www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/06/29/a-special-supplement-chomskys-revolution-in-lingui/.
3. In Stone Tools in Human Evolution: Behavioral Differences Among Technological Primates (Cambridge University Press, 2016), for example, palaeoanthropologist John Shea discusses the links between tools and language.
4. This is taken from Johan J. Bolhuis and Martin Everaert (eds), Birdsong, Speech, and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 729.
5. S. T. Piantadosi, H. Tily and E. Gibson, ‘The Communicative Function of Ambiguity in Language’, Cognition 122(3), 2012: 280–291; doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.004.
6. Such as Michael Anderson in his 2014 book, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), and Stanislas Dehaene in Reading in the Brain (New York: Viking, 2009).
7. See, for example, Robert C. Berwick, and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us? Language and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Martin B. Everaert et al., ‘Structures, Not Strings: Linguistics as Part of the Cognitive Sciences’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19(12), 2015: 729–743, a prolegomenon which, I hope, complements other empirical work: see Maggie Tallerman and Kathleen R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2012); B. Thompson, S. Kirby and K. Smith, ‘Culture Shapes the Evolution of Cognition’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113(16), 2016: 4530–4535; James R. Hurford, The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2011).
8. These terms come from the work of American anthropological linguist, Kenneth L. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, 2nd rev. edn (The Hague/Paris: Mouton & Co., 1967).
9. www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/homo-erectus-shell-04122014/.
10. T. J. H. Morgan et al., ‘Experimental Evidence for the Co-Evolution of Hominin Tool-Making, Teaching and Language’, Nature Communications 6, 2015: 6029; doi: 10.1038/ncomms7029.
11. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson are the leaders in the discussion of the roles of imitation vs innovation in cultural evolution and are the authors of many books about this tension. For example, see their The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2005) or Culture and the Evolutionary Process (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
12. The term ‘satisficing’ comes from the work of Nobel-prize-winning economist Herbert Simon in 1962. See, for example, ‘The Architecture of Complexity’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106(6): 467–482, and his 1947 book Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York: Macmillan).
13. Greg Urban, ‘Metasignaling and Language Origins’, American Anthropologist, New Series, 104(1), 2002: 233–246.
14. ‘It is not likely that there was any single mutation causing the origin of language, or even speech, as seen by the complex relationship between FOXP2 and CNTNAP2 and by the fact that FOXP2 regulates several hundred genes, including many that have non-language related functions …’ Karl C. Diller and Rebecca L. Cann, ‘The Innateness of Language: A View from Genetics’, in Andrew D. M. Smith, Marieke Schouwstra, Bart de Boer and Kenny Smith (eds), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Singapore: World Scientific, 2010), pp. 107–115.
15. Those interested in an analysis of Pirahã lacking grammar should consult Richard Futrell et al., ‘A Corpus Investigation of Syntactic Embedding in Pirahã’, at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0145289.
16. Caleb Everett has established this in extensive research on the interaction of climate, altitude and humidity on human sound systems, phonologies. (See Suggested Reading section.)
Chapter 5: Humans Get a Better Brain
1. Ralph L. Holloway, D. Broadfield and M. Yuan, The Human Fossil Record, vol. 3: Brain Endocasts: The Paleoneurological Evidence (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
2. William R. Leonard, J. Josh Snodgrass and Marcia L. Robertson, ‘Evolutionary Perspectives on Fat Ingestion and Metabolism in Humans’, in J. P. Montmayeur and J. le Coutre (eds), Fat Detection: Taste, Texture, and Post Ingestive Effects (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2010), chapter 1; www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53561/.
3. According to Indiana University palaeoneurologist Thomas Schoenemann in ‘Evolution of the Size and Functional Areas of the Human Brain’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 2006: 379–406; www.indiana.edu/~brainevo/publications/annurev.anthro.35.pdf.
4. P. Tom Schoenemann, ‘The Meaning of Brain Size: The Evolution of Conceptual Complexity’, in Kathy Schick, Douglas Broadfield, Nicholas Toth and Michael Yuan (eds), The Human Brain Evolving: Paleoneurological Studies in Honor of Ralph L. Holloway (Gosport, IN: Stone Age Institute Press, 2010), pp. 37–50.
5. Mark Grabowski, ‘Bigger Brains Led to Bigger Bodies?: The Correlated Evolution of Human Brain and Body Size’, Current Anthropology 57(2), 2016: 174; doi: 10.1086/685655.
6. In an entertaining book, Falk provides the best popular account of palaeoneurology. The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2012).
Chapter 6: How the Brain Makes Language Possible
1. Much of the material at the beginning of this chapter is taken from my Language: The Cultural Tool.
2. Philip Lieberman, Human Language and our Reptilian Brain: The Subcortical Bases of Speech, Syntax, and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
3. D. M. Tucker, G. A. Frishkoff and P. Luu, ‘Microgenesis of Language’, in Brigette Stemmer and Harry A. Whitaker, eds), Handbook of the Neuroscience of Language (London: Elsevier, 2008), pp. 45–56.
4. Jeffrey Elman et al., Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 241.
5. ‘… the observation that the term “Broca’s region” (and that of “Wernicke’s region”) is not consistently used in the literature sh
ould come as no surprise. This inconsistency is not just a problem of nomenclature; rather, it is a conceptual one.’ Katrin Amunts, ‘Architectonic Language Research’, in Brigitte Stemmer and Harry A. Whitaker (eds), Handbook of the Neuroscience of Language (London: Elsevier, 2008), pp. 33–44.
6. Ibid.
7. Ned T. Sahin, Steven Pinker, Sydney S. Cash, Donald Schomer and Eric Halgren. ‘Sequential Processing of Lexical, Grammatical, and Phonological Information Within Broca’s Area’, Science 326(5951), 2009: 445–449; doi: 10.1126/science.1174481.
8. Miguel Nicolelis and Ronald Cicurel, The Relativistic Brain: How it Works and Why it Cannot be Simulated by a Turing Machine (Durham, NC: Kios Press, 2015).
9. Marina Bedny, Hilary Richardson and Rebecca Saxe, ‘“Visual” Cortex Responds to Spoken Language in Blind Children’, Journal of Neuroscience 35(33), 2015: 11674–11681; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0634-15.2015.
10. Evelina Fedorenko, ‘The Role of Domain-General Cognitive Control in Language Comprehension’, Frontiers in Psychology 5, 2014: 335.
11. Larry Swanson, Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 11.
12. See Lieberman, The Evolution of the Human Head.
13. Berwick and Chomsky, Why Only Us?
14. Pierre Perruchet and Arnaud Rey, ‘Does the Mastery of Center-Embedded Linguistic Structures Distinguish Humans from Nonhuman Primates?’ Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 12(2), 2005: 307–313.
15. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000434.html.
16. Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
17. The best history of many of these theories of the human mind in my opinion is the magisterial, two-volume work of Margaret A. Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2006). Another important history of studies of the mind is Willem J. M. Levelt’s A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford University Press, 2014).
18. Ralph Holloway, ‘Brain Fossils: Endocasts’, in L. R. Squire (ed.), Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (London: Academic Press, 2009), vol. 2, pp. 353–361.
Chapter 7: When the Brain Goes Wrong
1. Yves Turgeon and Joël Macoir, ‘Classical and Contemporary Assessment of Aphasia and Acquired Disorders of Language’, in Brigette Stemmer and Harry A. Whitaker (eds), Handbook of the Neuroscience of Language (London: Elsevier, 2008), pp. 3–11.
2. Michael Ullman and Elizabeth Pierpont, ‘Specific Language Impairment is Not Specific to Language: The Procedural Deficit Hypothesis’, Cortex 41(3), 2005: 399–433.
3. Ibid.
4. D. V. M. Bishop and M. E. Hayiou-Thomas, ‘Heritability of Specific Language Impairment Depends on Diagnostic Criteria’, Genes, Brains, and Behavior 7(3), 2008: 365–372; doi: 10.1111/j.1601-183X.2007.00360.xPMCID: PMC2324210.
5. Turgeon and Macoir, ‘Classical and Contemporary Assessment’, p. 5.
6. Edward Gibson, Chaleece Sandberg, Evelina Fedorenko, Leon Bergen and Swathi Kiran, ‘A Rational Inference Approach to Aphasic Language Comprehension’, Aphasiology 30(11), 2015: 1341–1360; doi:10.1080/02687038.2015.1111994.
7. Richard Griffin and Daniel Dennett, ‘What Does the Study of Autism Tell Us About the Craft of Folk Psychology?’, in T. Striano and V. Reid (eds), Social Cognition: Development, Neuroscience, and Autism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 254–280.
8. In Jacob A. Burack and Tony Charman, The Development of Autism: Perspectives From Theory and Research (New York and London: Routledge, 2015).
Chapter 8: Talking with Tongues
1. Philip Lieberman, ‘Old-Time Linguistic Theories’, Cortex 44, 2008: 218–226.
2. W. Tecumseh Fitch, Bart de Boer, Neil Mathur and Asif A. Ghazanfar, ‘Monkey Vocal Tracts Are Speech-Ready’, Science Advances 2(12), 2016; http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1600723; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1600723.
3. These criticisms are not original with me. I have taken them almost exactly from an email by phonetician Caleb D. Everett of the University of Miami (the last name is not a coincidence).
4. Luigi Capasso, Elisabetta Michetti and Ruggero D’Anastasio, ‘A Homo Erectus Hyoid Bone: Possible Implications for the Origin of the Human Capability for Speech’, Collegium antropologicum 32(4), 2008: 1007–1011.
5. For a fuller account of the evolution and essential properties of hominid speech, I refer the reader to Philip Lieberman’s Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), from which I take much of the following material.
6. Ibid.
7. The following paragraphs borrow considerably from my Language: The Cultural Tool.
8. Paraphrased from Lieberman’s Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language.
Chapter 9: Where Grammar Came From
1. In his famous article, ‘The Origin of Speech’, Scientific American 203, 1960: 88–111.
2. Richard Futrell, et. al., ‘A Corpus Investigation of Syntactic Embedding in Pirahã’, PLoS ONE 11(3), 2016: e0145289; doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145289, argue that there exist modern human languages that come in lower in the Chomsky hierarchy than Chomsky would have predicted.
3. Fred Karlsson, ‘Origin and Maintenance of Clausal Embedding Complexity’, in Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil and Peter Trudgill (eds), Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 192–202, explains his notation thus:
‘I’ stands for initial clausal embedding, ‘C’ for clausal centre-embedding, ‘F’ for final clausal embedding, and the raised exponent expresses the maximal degree of embedding of a sentence, e. g. I-2 is double initial embedding as in sentence (6). Expressions like C-2 indicate type and embedding depth of individual clauses; e. g. C-2 is a centre-embedded clause at depth 2.
4. Donald Davidson, ‘On Saying That’, Synthese 19, 1968: 130–146.
5. Searle’s 1972 review in the New York Review of Books of Chomsky’s revolution: www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/06/29/a-special-supplement-chomskys-revolution-in-lingui/.
Chapter 10: Talking with the Hands
1. I attempt to develop just such a theory in Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, from which a good deal of the material in this chapter is taken.
2. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior.
3. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/world/europe/when-italians-chat-hands-and-fingers-do-the-talking.html.
4. David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (University of Chicago Press), 2005, p. 117.
Chapter 12: Communities and Communication
1. John McCarthy, ‘Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines’, manuscript, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 1979 (emphasis in original).
2. Marvin Harris, Cultural Anthropology (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999), pp. 23–24.
3. Ruth Millikan, Language: A Biological Model (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).
Index
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Asterisks (*) mean that relevant material is present only in a footnote; italic page numbers identify relevant Figures.
A
abstract thinking by Homo erectus 60–1, 113
Acheulean tools 37, 56, 58, 95, 97–8, 99
acoustic phonetics 176, 183
activity coordination, brain regions 138
the actuation problem 213
adaptation see exaptation
advanced tongue root 181, 209
Africa
as the birthplace of the Homo genus 6, 35, 46–7
click languages 180
Homo erectus migration from 30, 48, 57–8, 72, 98
Homo erectus travel within 52, 54
Homo sapiens migration from 46, 111, 113, 271
agglutinative languages 216, 217
agriculture, emergence of 120
air sacs, laryngeal 186
Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language 243
Alex the parrot 83, 105, 106*
Amazonia
Banawá people 1–4, 8, 87–8, 251
Hixkaryana language 219
Marajoara culture 72
syllables in languages of 206*
Torá people 280
Wari’ culture 151*, 287
see also Pirahã people and language
ambiguity in communication 75, 207, 222
anatomically modern humans 113, 144, 188
see also Homo sapiens
anatomy and language evolution 88
animal communication
danger of overinterpretation 44
distinction from language xiv–xv, 7–8, 156, 225
social relationships among 102
unspoken knowledge in 289–90
use of bodily resources 240–1, 289, 291
use of grammar 83
use of indexes 84, 225
use of syllables 207
use of syntax 105
animal experiments 122, 152, 207
animal prodigies
Alex the parrot 83, 105, 106*
Kanzi the bonobo 31
Koko the gorilla 105, 221, 225*
animal species
brain regions common to all 144
tool use among 54–5
where brains would be redundant 125
Anthony, Casey (mother) and Caylee (daughter) 13–14
anthropology, neglect by linguists 279
anthropomorphism and anthropocentricity 44
aphasia 121, 135, 137, 163–4, 225
apperceptions 51, 143, 156, 169, 243, 277, 289
Arabic language 180, 216
arbitrariness
of symbol associations 17, 85–6, 100, 103
in tool use 94
Ardipithecus 19, 41, 42, 114, 126
Aristotle 124, 233, 242
Arrernte people 239
art
Erfoud manuport 86, 92, 99
and intentionality 86, 90–1
Java shell-carvings 86, 94–5, 95
learned appreciation 92
Makapansgat pebble 86, 90, 91, 99
How Language Began Page 35
