Origins of language

Charles Ferndale

From the study of fossils, it seems clear that Homo sapiens had the physiological means to speak at least two hundred thousand years ago. Neanderthals were probably as intelligent as us, and were certainly able to communicate, but may not have had the physiological throat structures necessary for speech

I shall begin my discussion of the origins of language with a statement that I shall treat as an axiom of the life sciences. All functionally important characteristics possessed by any living creature are possessed because they conferred upon the ancestors of that creature the ability to propagate their genes successfully. And so, like all such characteristics, language was selected by the advantages it gave those who possessed it in their struggle to propagate their genes in the highly competitive struggles of life.

If the ability to communicate was selected because of the survival value it conferred upon its possessors, then a number of questions naturally arise: (i) What advantages did the ability to speak confer upon our ancestors, such that their genes out-proliferated those of members of our species who could not speak? (ii) Do any of our relatives in the animal world have the ability to speak? (iii) Can creatures communicate without language, and, if so, what additional features does linguistic communication confer on those who can do it? (iv) Can we imagine a persuasive evolutionary past that could explain the huge gulf between the abilities of humans to communicate, relative to the abilities of our closest rivals? (v) Exactly what were the selective pressures that came to bear on our ancestors and resulted in the evolution of skills so advanced that they would (apparently) not be fully needed until at least one hundred thousand years after they evolved? What we call civilisation comprises no more than eight percent of our life on earth, and advanced technological civilisation no more than 0.0005 percent of our life on earth, so why did a species that lived by gathering fruits and plants, and by using sticks and stones for weapons, need the (entirely unused, indeed unknown) ability to do all those things upon which our 21st century, technologically-driven, lives depend? We have not changed a lot over the last hundred thousand years, but the world in which we live has been changed dramatically by us. So, why did humans evolve the skills necessary to create a world so unhealthy to live in? Why did they evolve the ability to destroy life on earth? Most technological skills are language dependent. Or, put differently, why have we not evolved the skills to check ourselves from destroying the only world we have? I shall make no attempt to answer here these consequences of our mastery of language. But you should be aware of them (an interesting approach to answers to these questions can be found in: Jared Diamond: The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee and Collapse; and in Ronald Wright: A Short History of Progress).

It should come as no surprise that all the answers to these questions are still being hotly debated. Can animals other than us communicate? It depends upon what you mean by ‘communicate’, but, to be brief: yes, a lot of other animals, by many criteria, can communicate; some can even speak. What advantages does the ability to communicate confer on animals? Many: all of which depend upon the communicating animals being members of a community. Communication is restricted to social animals and is clearly an integral part of the advantages conferred by cooperation. When did the ability to communicate arise among our ancestors? Millions of years ago. When did hominids (man-like animals) first acquire the ability to speak? The answer is still debated and awaits the discovery of more bone fossils and other advances in our understanding of how speech sounds can be made. Nevertheless, from the study of fossils, it seems clear that Homo sapiens had the physiological means to speak at least two hundred thousand years ago. Neanderthals were probably as intelligent as us, and were certainly able to communicate, but may not have had the physiological throat structures necessary for speech (which is one explanation advanced for the probability that we wiped them out). When did we first evolve the ability to communicate by means of speech? It may be impossible to answer this question because speech in those early times left no traces, but art is a form of symbolism intended to be meaningful and the earliest undisputed evidence of art (75,000 years ago) comes from the Blombos caves at the most southern sea-shore of South Africa. After that there are debatable dates of cave rock carving in Australia about 50,000 years old. And, finally, the earliest cave paintings so far found in Europe (at Chauvet, in France) are just under 33,000 years old. So Homo sapiens have been communicating with symbols for at least 75,000 years.

Thus it appears that we can approach questions about the origins of language through many different fields of study. But we can also do so by studying what we might be called the logic of meaning. To do this is to analyse the necessary and sufficient conditions for successful communication among people to occur and to see how these conditions might give rise to the conventional uses of ordinary language.

I shall now construct an early human, pre-linguistic, context for communication, so we may discover what conditions must logically be met if effective communication is to occur. It might interest the reader that these conditions would apply to any attempt we might make to communicate with aliens from other parts of the universe, and that it was his failure to meet these conditions that made me think the great astronomer Carl Sagan’s attempts at communicating with aliens were bound to fail.

Imagine a world long before people began to live in settled communities, say 30,000 years ago. And imagine we are living in that world and are running along an unfrequented path through the wilds. We come suddenly upon a stretch of quicksand, well concealed by tussock grass, into which we are only saved from falling by good fortune. Now try to imagine what we would have to do to warn anyone else who came that way about the quicksand. In other words we want anyone following in our footsteps to conclude: someone is trying to tell me to beware of quicksand. For communication to occur, it would not be enough for the stranger to discover by some means (that may or may not have involved our intervention) that there was a dangerous patch of quicksand in the way of the path. That might happen if we place a cunningly concealed trip-rock on the path so that when the stranger tripped, his hands and face landed at the edge of the quicksand, but the rest of his body remained safely away from it. He might discover the quicksand, but fail to conclude that he had been intentionally warned about it by someone before him; that we had intentionally tripped him in order to tell him something. Communication would not have occurred unless, at the very least, he concluded that a communicative intention was involved. So communicative intentions logically predate communication, and probably predate them historically. Of course if the only people who might ever come that way shared a language, such as a jungle highway code, then all we should need to do was to put up a sign ‘Beware of Quicksand!’ But such a language has to grow out of something? Language use comes after the communications I am describing, which logically predate it. What are the logically necessary conditions out of which any language uses must grow? They must grow out of communally shared knowledge and assumptions. First, I must attract the stranger’s attention; I must do that in a way that causes him to believe that someone is trying to tell him something; then he must ask himself what I might mean him to conclude; then he must have a reasonable chance at arriving (guessing) at the right conclusion. Three of these four conditions necessary for successful communication require shared knowledge and presuppositions.

Once such a successful form of communication has taken place the beginnings of conventional language are in existence. Because, once the stranger shares his experience with the village to which he was travelling, it would be reasonable for the people there, when confronted by the need to communicate the same message in future, to use the same means. By accepting communally what means will be used to convey meanings, symbols with conventional meanings come into existence. What to use to say what you want to say becomes common knowledge. This is the essence of ordinary languages, of which highway codes are examples. From this analysis a very wide range of consequences flow.

The writer has degrees from the Oxford University and the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. He can be reached at charlesferndale@yahoo.co.uk