The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

by Christine Kenneally

  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.2 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.”3 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.

  The first perspective has dominated linguistics and cognitive science since the middle of the twentieth century. Since the 1990s, as researchers in different disciplines all over the world have grappled in earnest with language evolution, many have found that they are converging on the second. But instead of flipping entirely from one view to the other, the field is building a less absolute but more satisfying body of knowledge. The David-Goliath clash has not so much been lost or won as transformed into a struggle that is much more complex, though still deeply felt. What is both marvelous and perplexing about this struggle is that the resolution of one mystery often gives rise to another. For example, it now seems true to say that language arose very recently. It is also equally true to say that it did not. It’s reasonable to claim that human language is unique. But it is also useful, interesting, and fair to say that human language lies on a continuum that includes other human abilities and the abilities of nonhuman animals. As you’ll see throughout this book, language itself is one of the biggest obstacles to clarity in the study of language evolution.

  After this tour of important historical moments, part 2 asks how language evolved. Or rather, it doesn’t, explaining instead that that question is simply too monumental. What’s more, it is misleading. The word “language” is used to describe too many different phenomena, like the words we speak, the particular language we speak, the universal features all languages have in common, and the suite of inclinations and capacities that enables us to learn the language of our parents. Part 2 outlines and exa
mines the language suite—what abilities you have if you have human language. It takes the sounds we make, the way we string them together, our interactions and the learning in speech, and our gestures, imitation, and genes and explores when each of them appeared in the evolutionary trajectory of human beings.

  Even though the comparative, genetic, and linguistic evidence of part 2 demonstrates how various aspects of the language suite evolved so that we were born able to learn the language of our parents, all this amazing research leaves one crucial question unanswered: How did the language of our parents get here in the first place? Part 3 examines this question. It asks how all the pieces of the language suite wound together over time to give us what we have today. It introduces young researchers like Simon Kirby in Edinburgh and Morten Christiansen at Cornell, who use computer models to show that language can evolve all by itself. Kirby and Christiansen argue that one of the most useful ways to think of language is as a virus, one that grows and evolves symbiotically with human beings—meaning that language shifts around and adapts itself in order to develop and survive.

  Part 4 looks at what happens next. I wrote earlier that the study of language evolution had boomed since I was a linguistics undergraduate, and in fact the tumult and commotion have increased even more since I started writing this book. The debate about how and why language might have evolved was rejoined ever more loudly in 2002, when Noam Chomsky first published on the topic. Part 4 also ponders the future of language. If language has evolved, where will it head next? And where, for that matter, will we? New scholarship that claims the human species has stopped evolving biologically is discussed.

  Part 4 also examines why evolutionary narratives have been so unpopular in the field of language evolution. Finally, the epilogue asks what would happen to language if you shipwrecked a boatload of pre-linguistic babies on the rocky shores of Galápagos.

  This book is shaped by the fact that reporting on the life of an idea is a slippery task. If it were simply a matter of trying to render the intangible tangible, it would be hard. But it’s made more difficult by the fact that the abstract doesn’t exist, so to speak, in the abstract. Ideas are frustratingly anchored in the heads of individuals, and each of those individuals has his own version of any one thought. They all agree on some of the implications and none of the others. And everyone has a slightly different set of assumptions, not all of which he is conscious of or willing to admit to.

  Additionally, even though ideas come from nowhere but the heads of people, attributing them to individuals is tricky. Most ideas have been around forever in some form or other, yet the tides of thought follow no clear pattern. An idea can lie neglected for a millennium and then suddenly become invigorated by the agenda of a new age. And even when someone does come up with a really novel thought, it’s inevitably the case that someone else across the Atlantic or the Pacific has awoken that very morning with the same bulb flaring above her.

  We all want to believe that ideas rise or fall on their own merits, but in the real world they don’t. Both personality and ideology shape the pursuit of knowledge and affect the way an idea gets lost and found over the years. And if this is not just, then perhaps it is natural. After all, what we’re finding is that culture—which at its most basic is an interaction between two individuals—is a great force of evolution. Our personalities, our ideologies, and our ideas all arise from the same place—the intersection between biology and experience. Is it any wonder they are inextricable?

  The intent in telling this story is to render the large shifts of history. As much as possible, I try to avoid the hindsight that makes thinkers seem more sophisticated than they probably were at the time. I stay as far away as possible from labels like “behaviorism” and “positivism.” If you use these words precisely, each requires a manifesto of explication and qualification. Alternatively, if you use them but forgo the provisos, they tend to make people and ideas seem like caricatures. (For an intensely subtle history that tweezes apart each word in many historical utterances read Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky by Peter Matthews4 or The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris.)

  The study of language evolution has been enacted by a cast of hundreds. If you try to isolate the really gifted ones and the ones who represent a particular idea and the ones who’ll give you great quotations, there are still too many people to describe. This book focuses on the individuals that it does because they have made an idea their own in a striking and significant way. Perhaps, like Steven Pinker, they have combined a genius for cognitive science with a genius for timing. Or like Simon Kirby, they occupy a historically unique spot. Kirby, a young professor of language evolution at the University of Edinburgh, is not only spearheading research into the digital modeling of language; he was the first student to ever take an undergraduate and a graduate degree majoring in the evolution of language.

  Some events in this book are retold by just one individual; some are recounted by more. Other happenings and thoughts have been bequeathed to a kind of large, collective memory. As much as possible, I have tried to be clear about who is doing the remembering and whose lens is providing the viewpoint.

  Noam Chomsky stands out in this book as a hugely influential figure. He is also an abominably difficult subject. His theories and terminology have changed many times since the 1960s, and there are no complete and reliable road maps to these shifts. This drives academics as crazy as it does writers.

  Every interview I conducted for this book left me excited and always leaning toward the particular theory of whomever I had just spoken to. Everyone I interviewed was dynamic and engaged; a few were modest as well as intelligent. While all of them believe in science as the pursuit of truth, they also treat science as a competition. This eclectic group of psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and linguists (and the hundreds of people who are here but unnamed) are reaching into the deep past to crack open a mystery more than six million years in the making. Keep in mind that some of them will turn out to be completely wrong.

  Naturally, everyone thinks he has the right solution. At the time I wrote this introduction, pretty much every one of the main characters in this book, and a slew of others, was writing his own book to present at greater length his particular version of how language evolved.

  Why does language evolution matter? Because the story of language evolution underlies every other story that has ever existed and every story that ever will. Without this one tale, there are simply no such things as beginnings, middles, and ends. Only because the evolutionary plot unfolded in the way it did do we have yarns, fables, and parables, tragedies, farces, and thrillers, news reports, urban legends, and embarrassing anecdotes from childhood. The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.

  I. LANGUAGE IS NOT A THING

  Prologue

  The Panthéon in Paris sits on a hill, and when you stand on its roof and look out from each corner, the City of Light stretches beneath you. To the northwest the Eiffel Tower stands on the skyline, enormous but light. The Panthéon, in contrast, is massive. Its main chamber is supported by huge stone columns, and one floor below it lies the crypt. It’s damp and dark, and among its many graves is the one belonging to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died in 1778.

  Although he is best known for his political philosophy, Rousseau spent considerable time thinking about where language came from and what humans were like before they acquired it. He imagined a primeval forest where people wandered alone. If males and females crossed paths, they’d pause for sex, then go on their separate ways. Mothers and children abandoned one another as soon as possible, and because proximity was the only way they could tell they were related, a brief period apart soon rendered them unable to recognize their own kin.

  In his Essay on the Origin of Lang
uages, Rousseau wrote that when these roving, isolated creatures did communicate, they used crude cries and gestures that imitated animal vocalizations. A barking sound, for example, meant “dog.” Eventually, the bark came to represent the animal, and as humans expanded their repertoire of animal mimicry, they created the first words.

  This primal lexicon was limited by the range of sounds that could be mimicked, so Rousseau suggested that the original language was mostly gestural. Hand and body movements didn’t just supplement meaning; they formed an imprecise kind of sign language that worked in tandem with the vocal pantomime. Rousseau believed that language originally burst forth in times of crisis: “Man’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men, is the cry of Nature…wrested from him only by a sort of instinct on urgent occasions, to implore for help in great dangers or relief in violent ills.”1

  We eventually lost this body language, theorized Rousseau, because gestures aren’t as versatile as the spoken word. Hand movements can’t be seen at night or if the line of sight is somehow blocked.

  The eighteenth century was a time of energetic conjecture about the evolution of language, and Rousseau was heavily influenced by thinkers like the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder and Étienne Bonnot, the abbé de Condillac, who wrote a number of treatises on the nature and origins of language. Herder believed that humans first mimicked animal sounds to communicate. He also thought they imitated other sounds of nature, like the rustling of the wind or the babble of water.