Dan Falk is a Toronto-based science journalist and senior contributor to Undark, whose books include Shakespeare’s Science and In Search of Time. Originally published on Undark.
According to the Guinness World Records, The fastest talker in the world Sean Shannon can speak 665 words of English per minute (that’s 11 words) Every secondBut even those of us with average tongues seem to chatter incessantly (usually with fellow humans, but also when they’re not around, as Tom Hanks’ character did in the 2000 film “Star Wars: Episode I: The Last Jedi,” when he was trapped on a desert island for four years. “cast away,” He talks to himself as well as to volleyball.
There’s no doubt that we love to talk, but how did this come about? Sure, humpback whales sing, vervet monkeys make alarm calls, and honeybees dance to communicate information about food sources, but… Humans only How did humans develop full-fledged languages? Stephen Missen, a professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, is the perfect person to find out. In his new book, “Language Puzzles: Unravelling the 6-Million-Year Story of Language Evolution” This book is not the first to explore this question, but it is perhaps the most thorough to date. Drawing on the latest research findings from a variety of fields, including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, and genetics, Mithen takes the reader through some 1.6 million years of human evolution, from the earliest origins of language to our rich system of communication. Homo sapiens.
Many elements of this timeline are difficult if not impossible to pin down: after all, language doesn’t fossilize, and humans only began writing about 5,000 years ago, after hundreds of thousands of years of communicating orally. (Mithen places the dawn of what he calls “fully modern language” at about 40,000 years ago.)
Still, there are some figures we can estimate with some confidence. For example, because no other species, not even our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, uses language with a sophistication comparable to ours, it is reasonable to assume that the catalyst for the development of language capacity in our own lineage must have occurred after humans and chimpanzees diverged, about 6 million years ago.
Comparisons between chimpanzees and other apes are instructive; Mitten devotes an entire chapter to the subject. Chimpanzees do vocalize, but Mitten says that the sounds they make are not words (though he does acknowledge that they have “word-like qualities”). Although there are clear anatomical differences between humans and chimpanzees that hinder the latter’s ability to produce nuanced speech, Mitten points out that the fundamental obstacle to chimpanzee language is cognitive.
First, there is little evidence that chimpanzees think about what other chimpanzees are thinking, a skill psychologists call “theory of mind.” (Human children acquire this ability by about age 4.) Faced with this limitation, chimpanzees were never able to develop the language skills that would allow them to plan joint activities and work toward collective goals, as humans do. At some point, our ancestors certainly made this leap, and the consequences were profound.
As an example, Mithen asks us to think about the cognitive abilities needed to coordinate a group hunt. To talk about chasing and killing an antelope, he writes, requires that we at least refer to the antelope in some way, even when there isn’t one in sight. (Mithen calls this ability “substitution” — the ability to talk about things that aren’t in front of us, and it’s essential for describing the future and the past.) We have that ability. Early humans may have had it to a more modest degree. Chimpanzees don’t. And yet, Mithen suggests, it may be just a “small cognitive shift” that separates chimpanzee capabilities from those of humans.
What were our first words? Mithen emphasizes the difference between “arbitrary” words and “symbolic” words. The former are more general and have no connection between the sound of the word and what it represents. (For example, there is no connection between the English word “dog” and an actual dog, nor is there any such connection in any other language.) In contrast, symbolic words (also called sound-symbolic words) do Symbolic words have a connection to the thing they represent. The best-known example is onomatopoeia — think “bang” or “quack.” But they can also refer to an object by its sound, size, shape, movement, or texture. Mithen believes that symbolic words played an important role in the evolution of language, linking modern language with the “roars and grunts” of our chimpanzee-like ancestors.
The comparison between humans and chimpanzees is interesting, but the differences in language between us and other hominins (especially recent ones) are even more interesting. In parts of Europe and Western Asia, Homo sapiens Their close relatives, the Neanderthals, shared the same environment and even interbred with them. But the Neanderthals’ reputation Boost In recent years, Mithen has emphasized that Neanderthals were not on a par with humans. For one thing, they appear to have hardly innovated at all. He points out that while human tool use has changed dramatically over time, Neanderthals continued to use the same types of stone tools for around 300,000 years.
To what extent is this difference due to the presence or absence of language? Mithen suggests that Neanderthals may have been able to discuss the here and now, but had little or no capacity for abstraction; they probably lacked metaphor. In contrast, early human language was much more fluid. Our ancestors could compare A and B even when no examples of either were available. We could talk about ideas as easily as we could talk about objects.
Mitten is deeply interested in the extent to which early human language differed from that of Neanderthals. Today, we are in the habit of comparing things to other things; we express space in terms of time (“the store is five minutes away”), and time in terms of space (“a 30-minute layover is too close for comfort”). Imagining how our ancestors first ventured into this kind of language use, Mitten paints the following picture: “Cognitive fluidity allowed Homo sapiens The mother described her daughter as brave as a lion, but believed that lions had human-like thoughts and desires. Time could be expressed as space, and space could be expressed in terms derived from the human body.
While the ability to master metaphorical language has obvious uses, Mithen points to another development that may have arisen around the same time but isn’t obviously related to metaphor: humor. “Puns, double meanings, and innuendos all depend on metaphor and our linguistic fluency, and they permeate language,” he writes. “They gave modern humans a linguistic pleasure that specialized Neanderthals lacked. Homo sapiens laughed its way into modernity.”
Many questions lurk in the background: Does the way we speak affect the way we think? Or is language an essential component of consciousness itself? Mithen speculates about the connection between inner voice and consciousness, but he is cautious: “Inner spoken words may bring our concepts into consciousness, and inner words may themselves be considered a kind of thinking,” he writes, but he also points out that most of our thinking takes place without words.
Regular readers of such books will recognize many familiar elements. In one sense, “Language Puzzles” is Homo sapiensInevitably, there will be overlap with books that explain race, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling The Human Race. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” Or Leonard Mlodinov’s “Honest Thinkers” But a story as important as this deserves to be told again and again, and Mithen’s laser-like focus on issues of communication and language is what makes his story stand out.
There are plenty of surprises along the way, especially in the little details: Mithen points out, for example, that English has many similar words related to “slow movement,” all of which begin with “sl.” slow, slide, Slurs, Hunchbackand SlimeIn each case, he “moved his tongue across the palette, sl- The essence of these words can only be described as a slow gliding of the tongue.”
As humans developed the capacity for language, “we became utterly dependent on words for every aspect of our lives,” Mithen writes. “To sustain that dependence, evolution not only endowed us with the joy of language, but made language the life force of humans.” Mithen’s book is fascinating, detailed, and extremely thorough, bringing a fresh and welcome perspective to an age-old mystery.
