Language has universally been felt to constitute the attribute that sets humans apart from other species. The quest to understand why and how the capacity to speak came to be has been central to our understanding of the nature of humankind. In this chapter, we focus on the speculations and explanations of the origin and evolution of language, highlighting attempts to answer this question from the ancient Greeks to the present day. A number of perspectives are presented, more or less in phase with the chronological development of the related ideas. Early thoughts on language origin in antiquity, the language deprivation experiments, and the Christian-era reflections on the origin of language constitute the first perspectives. Next, some pre-Darwinian accounts of the origin of language are explored, specifically Condillac’s and Monboddo’s views, as best reflecting the spirit of the Enlightenment, and Herder’s treatise on the subject. The historical context of the Société de Linguistique de Paris’s ban on this very topic is then examined, revealing the enduring misperception of its nature and causes. Charles Darwin’s views, seldom part of discussions on the origin of language, are also presented. We close the chapter with a brief overview of current questions and directions that characterize contemporary efforts at elucidating this fascinating problem.
The eighteenth century constituted a “turning point” in our intellectual tradition: the question of the origin of languages became a question for “natural philosophy” or speculation, which in most cases avoided recourse to religion. This change had solid philosophical bases. By refusing to accept Descartes’ idea that language could be innate, the empiricists were obliged to discuss its initial appearance or, in the most extreme cases, the faculties that make it possible to obtain ideas and form them into coherent representations. Two influential models are contrasted. In the speculative model, the important thing was to establish a plausible scenario on the basis of minimal hypotheses. The origin of languages is a fundamental building block in the formation of knowledge, as we can see in Condillac’s Traité sur l’origine des connaissances (1744). In the historical model, which continued well into the next century, it is the accumulation of knowledge that necessarily stimulated questions about the nature of language and of humanity. In his Monde Primitif Comparé et Analysé avec le Monde Moderne (1773–1782), Antoine Court de Gébelin relied on comparisons between the grammars and vocabularies of the languages of the world, and on the vast progress in phonetics made in the eighteenth century from a physiological and acoustic perspective. Thus, these Enlightenment scholars placed the question of language origin in a new scientific/natural and secular context; they were devoted to increasing knowledge and discussing hypotheses on the basis of an ever-growing body of linguistic data. From this point of view, we are all the heirs of the Enlightenment.
Theorists of the origins of language seem to assume that the only function of language is communication. Or that everything that language is and does can be explained as if it were simply an advanced form of communication. In fact, though, virtually all languages are far more complex than they need to be for one-to-one communication. This paper attempts to answer the question as to why that should be. It argues that the answer lies in the evolution of narrative, that is, story-telling, legend, and myth, as culturally important means of expression. It demonstrates that the evolution of narrative, and especially of myth, requires linguistic complexity, and in particular, recursion. It further argues that language coevolved with mythology in symbolic frameworks which extended, to the limits of cognition, the capacity for verbal expression.The focus is on just one sentence, which describes a habitually continuous action, within an interrogative sentence, within an imperative sentence, within another imperative sentence, within an indicative sentence, within a /Xam myth or fable in which animals act as people, but in culturally meaningful and stylized form.
The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of this one saw a reorganization of research in the field of speech and language emergence (SLE). Naturalism is the core of this new approach. It consists in describing the relations between biological aspects (in every sense of the word) on the one hand and speech and language, on the other hand, by an accumulation of hypotheses and evidence derived from a wide range of data collected by means of interdisciplinary collaborations. As with studies on the origin of man, a profusion of hypotheses has arisen, which sometimes lead to very dubious developments, based on flimsy results and on too little data, and connected to related but not fully mastered or overly simplified disciplines. This is why regular critical overviews do not seem superfluous. First, we propose a classification (push and pull theory) that provides a new reading of the various theories which have been proposed for half a century. In the present state of knowledge, it is not possible to infer when our ancestors acquired the faculty of speech and language: control of speech articulators, coordination between larynx and vocal tract, phonology, syntax, semantics, and recursion. Some longstanding questions remain unanswered: Why is our species alone in having speech and language? Many other questions are (for now) badly formulated problems: we do not have sufficient data to answer them. Perhaps these questions will remain unanswered. But we think that the following question can be answered: If we suppose that our ancestors (and distant cousins) controlled their larynx and vocal tract in the same way as present-day humans, did the geometry of their vocal tract allow them to produce the universal sound structures of the languages spoken today? We analyzed 32 skulls from the present to 1.6 Ma (million years) BP (before present) of fossil hominids available at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris or in the literature: (1) 10–30 ka (thousand years) BP: modern humans: Paleolithic; (2) 90–200 ka BP: anatomically modern humans; (3) 45–90 ka BP: Neanderthals; (4) 1.6 Ma BP: Homo ergaster. These skulls are all well preserved and most possess a mandible but the vertebral column has been reconstructed from some fossil vertebrae. We attempt to: (1) identify the position of the hyoid bone and glottis; (2) reconstruct a vocal tract in a plausible way using an articulatory model; (3) quantify the acoustic capabilities of this reconstructed vocal tract. For this purpose, we combine phylogeny and ontogeny. We can now state that our ancestors and distant cousins were equipped with a vocal tract that could produce the same variety of vowel sounds as we can today: mainly the vowels /i a u/. Vocal tract morphology has allowed for the emergence and production of speech for several hundred thousand years. But how can we know to what extent earlier hominids mastered the control skills needed to produce speech? New lines of research are proposed in which orofacial abilities necessary to the emergence of speech are linked to a precursor mechanism dedicated to feeding (masticating-swallowing gestures).
Unwritten language leaves no material traces, so whether or not a particular fossil hominid possessed language must be inferred from proxy evidence. This leaves a great deal of room for argument. My contention here is that the intimate feedback between language and symbolic cognition strongly implies that the possession of language may only be confidently inferred from the material products of symbolic minds. Such products include geometrical and realistic imagery, items of symbolic bodily adornment, highly complex multistage technologies, and even radical alterations in the tempo of change itself. Evidence in these categories is known from African sites dating from the later Middle Stone Age, ca. 80 kyr ago, and possibly earlier. However, even the most ancient such sites considerably postdate the appearance in the same continent of Homo sapiens as an anatomically distinct entity, at some point around 200 kyr ago. The first anatomically modern people appear to have possessed behavioral repertoires not unlike those of contemporaneous nonsymbolic hominids such as Homo neanderthalensis, strongly suggesting (1) that symbolic cognition, and by extension language, were acquired by Homo sapiens well within its tenure, and (2) that at this point the anatomical structures necessary for producing modern speech had already been in existence for a considerable time, having been acquired initially in another context entirely. What is more, the neural substrate that permits symbolic thought was clearly already present, having presumably been acquired in the major developmental reorganization that gave rise to Homo sapiens as a distinct anatomical entity. The biology, after all, must have been in place to allow the behavior to be expressed. But the immediate impetus to the acquisition of symbolic thought appears necessarily to have been cultural rather than biological. Most likely, this stimulus was the invention of language, which, as an externalized attribute, could have spread with particular rapidity through a biologically enabled population.
Archeology is one of the few disciplines likely to provide hints about when the faculty of language evolved in the human lineage. Nevertheless, what can be inferred from the material culture and bony remains of our ancestors is still disputed. This chapter focuses on one debate that has received significant attention recently. Is it possible to infer “symbolic behavior” from the material culture of early Homo sapiens during the ca. 300 to 30 ka Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Africa? We argue that the question is answered differently depending on how we perceive the cognitive foundation of symbolic behavior. Our view is that symbolic behavior in humans stems from human-specific socio-cognitive and socio-affective skills. We then argue that the presence of these capacities – and indirectly of symbolic behavior – is evidenced by a range of innovations in the southern African archeological record during the MSA. During this period, and especially after ca. 100 ka, groups of early Homo sapiens began to invest significant time and energy in the nonidiosyncratic alteration of the appearance of their material culture. They made use of personal ornaments, produced abstract engravings, and included a stylistic component in their bone and stone tools. Some of the technology they used to produce their tools was highly innovative. Probably for the first time in prehistory our ancestors began to live in societies in which people cared about how others saw the world and about transforming their environment in a way that met others’ expectations. In other words, they lived in a world of shared meanings.
Several lines of evidence suggest that human language originated in manual gestures, not vocal calls. These include: (1) the use of the hands as the more natural way to depict events in space and time; (2) the ability of nonhuman primates to use manual action flexibly and intentionally; (3) the nature of the primate mirror system and its homology with the language circuits in the human brain; (4) the relative success in teaching apes to communicate gesturally rather than vocally; (5) the ready invention of sophisticated signed languages by the deaf; (6) the critical role of pointing in the way young children learn language; and (7) the correlation between handedness and cerebral asymmetry for language. The eventual switch to speech miniaturized the system, selected because it freed the hands for other functions, such as carrying things, and the manufacture and use of tools.
An influential position in linguistics is that human language has not evolved primarily as a communication device, but as a “system of thought.” This system enables humans to refer to the outside world in ways that cannot be reduced to a “peculiar nature belonging to [a] thing” and to construct an infinite number of internal structures by merging (Chomsky 2005). Whether such an evolutionary scenario is plausible will depend much on comparative research with primates. Recent field experiments suggest that mental concepts of nonhuman primates can do more than refer to the physical properties of the outside world; there is evidence for distinct idiosyncratic qualities coined by the “cultural” background of their bearers. There is also evidence that primates perform basic mental operations when attending to each other’s calls, and that they combine elements of their repertoire to generate meanings that are independent of the constituent parts. Finally, there is a consensus that evolution has shaped primate communication as a device to pursue social goals, and it is unclear why humans should have been exempt from this process. In conclusion, contrary to the “cognition over communication” hypothesis, there is evolutionary continuity in mental operations and communicative versatility, suggesting that language evolved gradually from a nonlinguistic precursor in ancestral human population that also underwent an unprecedented increase in relative brain size and mental capacity.
From a linguist’s point of view, the ability to vocalize new sounds may not seem to be a critical component of language. Yet when this ability is impaired, the social and emotional consequences for the affected individual can be severe, as evidenced by those suffering from developmental or injury-related speech disorders. How are we to understand this vocal learning trait, and where should it be placed within a framework for language evolution? Here, I argue that studying the supporting brain pathways that are affected in vocal learning disorders is a good place to start. Since such study is largely limited to noninvasive methods in humans, investigating other animals that possess this rare trait paves the way for a comparative analysis of the molecular, cellular, and synaptic bases of vocal production learning, including human speech. This kind of inquiry can highlight shared evolutionary pathways as well as key detours.
The question of the rules by which left-hemisphere specialization (HS) is established for language is connected to issues related to the origins of language. Exploration of the relationships between variability in linguistic neural networks and HS allows one to examine the relationships between the neural support for language, HS, and the emergence of speech. Studies of aphasiology, presurgical exploration, and intraoperative stimulation have shown a strong correlation between right-handedness and left-hemisphere dominance for language. The hypothesis that the neural bases of language developed in the dominant hemisphere for right-hand motor control coincides with motor theories of language evolution. The fact that exceptions to this rule exist, such as aphasias after right-hemisphere lesions in right-handers or functional imaging observations of healthy right-handers with rightward asymmetries during linguistic tasks, suggests that factors other than handedness may be at play in the development of HS. For example, the observation of increased lateralization of activation for speech listening with increased brain volume suggests that constraints related to the processing speed of speech sounds also play a role in the development of HS. This role of brain volume is consistent with the perceptual theory of the origin of HS, which postulates that language develops in the left hemisphere because of its aptitude for processing rapid temporal signals, which is indispensable for the analysis of speech sounds. Anatomical factors related to this perceptual processing likely combined with the influence of handedness in the course of language and language network evolution.
In this chapter, we explore the relationships between sensorimotor constraints and the organization of sound patterns. An investigation of universal tendencies found in languages of the world reveals some recurrent patterns that are hypothesized to be related to the speaker’s production mechanism and the listener’s perceptual system. Linguistic/phonemic representations would thus be tightly related to physical and peripheral constraints, suggesting that the origins of languages are to be found, at least partly, in the human body.
Organisms’ adaptive success depends on being able to do the right thing with the right kind of thing. This is categorization. Most species can learn categories (1) by direct experience (“induction”). Only human beings can learn categories (2) by word of mouth (“instruction”). Artificial-life simulations have shown the evolutionary advantage of instruction over induction and human electrophysiology experiments have shown that these two radically different ways of acquiring categories still share some common features in our brains today. Graph-theoretic analyses reveal that dictionaries consist of a core of more concrete words that are learned earlier, by direct experience (induction); the meanings of the rest of the dictionary can be learned by definition (instruction) alone, by combining the inductively grounded core words into subject/predicate propositions with truth values. We conjecture that language began when attempts to communicate through miming became conventionalized into arbitrary sequences of shared, increasingly arbitrary category names that made it possible for members of our species to transmit new categories to one another by defining and describing them via propositions (instruction).
Two simple possibilities, one for the origin of sound patterns of languages and one for the origin of their linkage with concepts, are suggested, both based on behaviors observable today. The sound patterns may have been those of present-day babbling, definable as one or more instances of a rhythmic alternation of a closed and open mouth, produced by a mandibular elevation/depression cycle, accompanied by vocal fold vibration, and linguistically meaningless, though giving the perceptual impression of a consonant-vowel (CV) sequence. An example is bababa. Babbling is one of innumerable instances of “fixed action patterns” in nature – innate behavior repertoire components with “form constancy” (e.g. rodent grooming, mating rituals), which provide an initial framework for species-wide motor adaptations. Babbling may have evolved in the manner of many other adaptations noted by the discipline of evolutionary developmental psychology (“Evo Devo”) whereby a genetically determined change in development (ontogeny) in effect “formulates new phylogeny” (Goodman & Coughlin 2000, p. 2445). The simple possibility for the initial linking of sound patterns with concepts is that it occurred in the context of a particular language-related genre present today: “baby talk,” a communicative matrix specific to the parent-infant dyad. The key to understanding this putative development lies in an explanation for the consistent presence across the world’s languages of nasal consonants in maternal terms and non-nasal forms in paternal terms, both in baby talk (e.g. mama, papa) and in the probably derived parental terms of language proper (e.g. mother, father). The maternal term may have been invented when the female parent decided that a mother-directed infant nasalized demand vocalization stood for her, and the paternal term may have developed later with a necessarily perceptually contrastive non-nasal structure.
Contrary to the received idea that globally spread papa/mama words are constantly reinvented by children in different languages, we show here that these words are always inherited from the most ancient stages of their respective families, with the exception of a number of borrowings – which are not innovations, either. We then show that probabilistic calculations aiming to demonstrate that global and other remote etymologies might be mere chance resemblances are invalid, and that chance cannot be reasonably invoked in the cases these calculations deal with. Consequently, the global convergence of papa/mama words can only be a trace of a common heritage of all human languages. Finally, we link this finding with others, indicating that these words must have appeared early, most probably at the very origin of articulate language.
The goals of the present chapter are twofold. On the one hand, it aims to show the potential that studies on grammaticalization offer for reconstructing earlier phases in the evolution of language or languages, that is, phases that are not within the scope of the classical methods of historical linguistics. What distinguishes grammaticalization theory from other linguistic approaches that have been recruited is that it has a diachronic foundation and that the hypotheses proposed on the basis of this theory rest, first, on regularities in linguistic change and, second, on typological generalizations across languages. Building on the reconstruction work proposed in Heine and Kuteva (2007), the chapter looks at some phenomena that were not discussed there. One of these phenomena concerns the role of “linguistic fossils” in discourse organization. The focus of the present paper is on the question of what such possible “fossils” can tell us about the structure that early human language may have had.
The question of the origin of language is difficult to answer since language is involved in a complex way in all human activities. Yet it can be answered if we concentrate on the design properties of the linguistic sign and how they relate to recently discovered properties that are unique to the human brain. Human language is the result of a cascade of consequences from a suite of minute neurological changes that give some human neuronal systems a new “representational” capacity. These changes make sense in evolution, and there is empirical evidence for them. These uniquely human systems of neurons have the capacity to operate offline for input as well as output (Hurley 2008): they can be triggered not only by external events stimulating our perceptual systems but also by brain-internal events; they can also be activated while inhibiting output to any external (motoric) system. These Offline Brain Systems are not specifically designed for language but they provide the crucial property that made it possible for further innovations to occur that led to language; they coincidentally allowed mental states corresponding to elements of the perceptual and conceptual substances of language to meet in our brains to form Saussurean signs. Recursivity derives from the self-organization triggered by the chaotic system that emerged, and required no innovation in the human lineage. Keywords: Offline neuronal systems; Saussurean signs; self-organization; recursivity
In the literature on the origins and the evolution of language, the general assumption is that language started as a restricted code, referred to as “protolanguage.” Since there is no direct access to data manifesting the nature of incipient human language, it is inferred that restricted linguistic codes that are presently available may provide a window on the nature of protolanguage. Pidgin languages feature among the restricted codes that have been identified in the literature (e.g. Bickerton 1984). This chapter bears on the relevance of pidgins (and creoles) (PCs) in the debate on the origins and evolution of language. The first part is dedicated to the Bickertonian approach to pidgin and creole genesis. It presents the main features of this research paradigm, as well as a critical discussion of its various components. The second part reports on the shift in research paradigm in the field of pidgin and creole studies, from the study of language varieties to the study of the processes that yield these language varieties. On the basis of the data and analyses presented in the first two parts of the paper, the third part addresses the question of whether the pidgin/creole sequence actually does provide us with a window on the protolanguage/language sequence. My conclusion is twofold: First, pidgins and protolanguage are not alike. Second, the sequence pidgin/creole does not give us a window on the protolanguage/language sequence. Major arguments include the fact that pidgins, even restricted ones, are too elaborate to serve as analogues of protolanguage, and the fact that PCs are not created ex nihilo.
Computational and mathematical modeling has revealed that cultural evolution may have played a key role in the evolution of language. In this chapter, I explore the hypothesis that processes of cultural transmission have to a large extent shaped language to fit domain-general constraints deriving from the human brain. An implication of this view is that much of the neural hardware involved in language is not specific to it. But how could language have evolved to be as complex as it is without language-specific constraints? Based on computational modeling of the cultural evolution of language, I propose that language has evolved to rely on a multitude of probabilistic information sources for its acquisition, allowing it to be as expressive as possible while still being learnable by domain-general learning mechanisms. Empirical predictions are derived from this perspective regarding the role of phonological cues in the learning of basic aspects of syntax. These predictions are corroborated by results from corpus analyses, computational modeling, and human experimentation, suggesting that the integration of phonological cues with other types of information is integral to the computational architecture of our language capacity. I conclude by considering how computational modeling of cultural evolution can help us understand the evolution of language.
The paper introduces a methodology for developing evolutionary explanations for phenomena observed in human natural languages. The methodology is inspired by Evolutionary Biology but maps the Darwinian selectionist framework to the cognitive, linguistic, and cultural levels.
Modeling the evolution of communication and language is one of the most fascinating and challenging problems in science. Progressing toward this ambitious goal implies explaining how simple communication forms emerged in the first place and how they evolved into structured communication systems with the characteristics of human language. In this chapter, we will illustrate how communication systems originate and evolve in a population of robots that adapt to a given task/environment. The analysis of these synthetic experiments can help us to understand: (i) how communication can emerge in a population of initially noncommunicating individuals, (ii) what conditions represent a prerequisite for the emergence of a robust and stable communication system, (iii) how the communication system changes by eventually increasing in complexity, and (iv) how signals and meanings originate and how they are grounded in robots’ sensorimotor states.
We first address diverse criteria on what a theory of language evolution should explain, focusing on six divides: evolution did/did not yield a Universal Grammar; brain evolution is/is not important; language is to be viewed as speech or multimodal communication; language evolution is/is not best understood solely with reference to tools for communication; we do/do not need a notion of protolanguage as a precursor to language; and protolanguage was/was not in great part holophrastic. We argue against a role for an innate Universal Grammar in language acquisition and language change, and then present a brief case study of the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language in a few decades. Finally, we present the mirror system hypothesis on the evolution of the language-ready brain locating it within the 6 divides and charting a path for biological evolution supporting mechanisms for simple and complex imitation, pantomime, protosign and protospeech in turn, claiming that this provided an adequate base for true languages to emerge through cultural evolution.
Language has universally been felt to constitute the attribute that sets humans apart from other species. The quest to understand why and how the capacity to speak came to be has been central to our understanding of the nature of humankind. In this chapter, we focus on the speculations and explanations of the origin and evolution of language, highlighting attempts to answer this question from the ancient Greeks to the present day. A number of perspectives are presented, more or less in phase with the chronological development of the related ideas. Early thoughts on language origin in antiquity, the language deprivation experiments, and the Christian-era reflections on the origin of language constitute the first perspectives. Next, some pre-Darwinian accounts of the origin of language are explored, specifically Condillac’s and Monboddo’s views, as best reflecting the spirit of the Enlightenment, and Herder’s treatise on the subject. The historical context of the Société de Linguistique de Paris’s ban on this very topic is then examined, revealing the enduring misperception of its nature and causes. Charles Darwin’s views, seldom part of discussions on the origin of language, are also presented. We close the chapter with a brief overview of current questions and directions that characterize contemporary efforts at elucidating this fascinating problem.
The eighteenth century constituted a “turning point” in our intellectual tradition: the question of the origin of languages became a question for “natural philosophy” or speculation, which in most cases avoided recourse to religion. This change had solid philosophical bases. By refusing to accept Descartes’ idea that language could be innate, the empiricists were obliged to discuss its initial appearance or, in the most extreme cases, the faculties that make it possible to obtain ideas and form them into coherent representations. Two influential models are contrasted. In the speculative model, the important thing was to establish a plausible scenario on the basis of minimal hypotheses. The origin of languages is a fundamental building block in the formation of knowledge, as we can see in Condillac’s Traité sur l’origine des connaissances (1744). In the historical model, which continued well into the next century, it is the accumulation of knowledge that necessarily stimulated questions about the nature of language and of humanity. In his Monde Primitif Comparé et Analysé avec le Monde Moderne (1773–1782), Antoine Court de Gébelin relied on comparisons between the grammars and vocabularies of the languages of the world, and on the vast progress in phonetics made in the eighteenth century from a physiological and acoustic perspective. Thus, these Enlightenment scholars placed the question of language origin in a new scientific/natural and secular context; they were devoted to increasing knowledge and discussing hypotheses on the basis of an ever-growing body of linguistic data. From this point of view, we are all the heirs of the Enlightenment.
Theorists of the origins of language seem to assume that the only function of language is communication. Or that everything that language is and does can be explained as if it were simply an advanced form of communication. In fact, though, virtually all languages are far more complex than they need to be for one-to-one communication. This paper attempts to answer the question as to why that should be. It argues that the answer lies in the evolution of narrative, that is, story-telling, legend, and myth, as culturally important means of expression. It demonstrates that the evolution of narrative, and especially of myth, requires linguistic complexity, and in particular, recursion. It further argues that language coevolved with mythology in symbolic frameworks which extended, to the limits of cognition, the capacity for verbal expression.The focus is on just one sentence, which describes a habitually continuous action, within an interrogative sentence, within an imperative sentence, within another imperative sentence, within an indicative sentence, within a /Xam myth or fable in which animals act as people, but in culturally meaningful and stylized form.
The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of this one saw a reorganization of research in the field of speech and language emergence (SLE). Naturalism is the core of this new approach. It consists in describing the relations between biological aspects (in every sense of the word) on the one hand and speech and language, on the other hand, by an accumulation of hypotheses and evidence derived from a wide range of data collected by means of interdisciplinary collaborations. As with studies on the origin of man, a profusion of hypotheses has arisen, which sometimes lead to very dubious developments, based on flimsy results and on too little data, and connected to related but not fully mastered or overly simplified disciplines. This is why regular critical overviews do not seem superfluous. First, we propose a classification (push and pull theory) that provides a new reading of the various theories which have been proposed for half a century. In the present state of knowledge, it is not possible to infer when our ancestors acquired the faculty of speech and language: control of speech articulators, coordination between larynx and vocal tract, phonology, syntax, semantics, and recursion. Some longstanding questions remain unanswered: Why is our species alone in having speech and language? Many other questions are (for now) badly formulated problems: we do not have sufficient data to answer them. Perhaps these questions will remain unanswered. But we think that the following question can be answered: If we suppose that our ancestors (and distant cousins) controlled their larynx and vocal tract in the same way as present-day humans, did the geometry of their vocal tract allow them to produce the universal sound structures of the languages spoken today? We analyzed 32 skulls from the present to 1.6 Ma (million years) BP (before present) of fossil hominids available at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris or in the literature: (1) 10–30 ka (thousand years) BP: modern humans: Paleolithic; (2) 90–200 ka BP: anatomically modern humans; (3) 45–90 ka BP: Neanderthals; (4) 1.6 Ma BP: Homo ergaster. These skulls are all well preserved and most possess a mandible but the vertebral column has been reconstructed from some fossil vertebrae. We attempt to: (1) identify the position of the hyoid bone and glottis; (2) reconstruct a vocal tract in a plausible way using an articulatory model; (3) quantify the acoustic capabilities of this reconstructed vocal tract. For this purpose, we combine phylogeny and ontogeny. We can now state that our ancestors and distant cousins were equipped with a vocal tract that could produce the same variety of vowel sounds as we can today: mainly the vowels /i a u/. Vocal tract morphology has allowed for the emergence and production of speech for several hundred thousand years. But how can we know to what extent earlier hominids mastered the control skills needed to produce speech? New lines of research are proposed in which orofacial abilities necessary to the emergence of speech are linked to a precursor mechanism dedicated to feeding (masticating-swallowing gestures).
Unwritten language leaves no material traces, so whether or not a particular fossil hominid possessed language must be inferred from proxy evidence. This leaves a great deal of room for argument. My contention here is that the intimate feedback between language and symbolic cognition strongly implies that the possession of language may only be confidently inferred from the material products of symbolic minds. Such products include geometrical and realistic imagery, items of symbolic bodily adornment, highly complex multistage technologies, and even radical alterations in the tempo of change itself. Evidence in these categories is known from African sites dating from the later Middle Stone Age, ca. 80 kyr ago, and possibly earlier. However, even the most ancient such sites considerably postdate the appearance in the same continent of Homo sapiens as an anatomically distinct entity, at some point around 200 kyr ago. The first anatomically modern people appear to have possessed behavioral repertoires not unlike those of contemporaneous nonsymbolic hominids such as Homo neanderthalensis, strongly suggesting (1) that symbolic cognition, and by extension language, were acquired by Homo sapiens well within its tenure, and (2) that at this point the anatomical structures necessary for producing modern speech had already been in existence for a considerable time, having been acquired initially in another context entirely. What is more, the neural substrate that permits symbolic thought was clearly already present, having presumably been acquired in the major developmental reorganization that gave rise to Homo sapiens as a distinct anatomical entity. The biology, after all, must have been in place to allow the behavior to be expressed. But the immediate impetus to the acquisition of symbolic thought appears necessarily to have been cultural rather than biological. Most likely, this stimulus was the invention of language, which, as an externalized attribute, could have spread with particular rapidity through a biologically enabled population.
Archeology is one of the few disciplines likely to provide hints about when the faculty of language evolved in the human lineage. Nevertheless, what can be inferred from the material culture and bony remains of our ancestors is still disputed. This chapter focuses on one debate that has received significant attention recently. Is it possible to infer “symbolic behavior” from the material culture of early Homo sapiens during the ca. 300 to 30 ka Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Africa? We argue that the question is answered differently depending on how we perceive the cognitive foundation of symbolic behavior. Our view is that symbolic behavior in humans stems from human-specific socio-cognitive and socio-affective skills. We then argue that the presence of these capacities – and indirectly of symbolic behavior – is evidenced by a range of innovations in the southern African archeological record during the MSA. During this period, and especially after ca. 100 ka, groups of early Homo sapiens began to invest significant time and energy in the nonidiosyncratic alteration of the appearance of their material culture. They made use of personal ornaments, produced abstract engravings, and included a stylistic component in their bone and stone tools. Some of the technology they used to produce their tools was highly innovative. Probably for the first time in prehistory our ancestors began to live in societies in which people cared about how others saw the world and about transforming their environment in a way that met others’ expectations. In other words, they lived in a world of shared meanings.
Several lines of evidence suggest that human language originated in manual gestures, not vocal calls. These include: (1) the use of the hands as the more natural way to depict events in space and time; (2) the ability of nonhuman primates to use manual action flexibly and intentionally; (3) the nature of the primate mirror system and its homology with the language circuits in the human brain; (4) the relative success in teaching apes to communicate gesturally rather than vocally; (5) the ready invention of sophisticated signed languages by the deaf; (6) the critical role of pointing in the way young children learn language; and (7) the correlation between handedness and cerebral asymmetry for language. The eventual switch to speech miniaturized the system, selected because it freed the hands for other functions, such as carrying things, and the manufacture and use of tools.
An influential position in linguistics is that human language has not evolved primarily as a communication device, but as a “system of thought.” This system enables humans to refer to the outside world in ways that cannot be reduced to a “peculiar nature belonging to [a] thing” and to construct an infinite number of internal structures by merging (Chomsky 2005). Whether such an evolutionary scenario is plausible will depend much on comparative research with primates. Recent field experiments suggest that mental concepts of nonhuman primates can do more than refer to the physical properties of the outside world; there is evidence for distinct idiosyncratic qualities coined by the “cultural” background of their bearers. There is also evidence that primates perform basic mental operations when attending to each other’s calls, and that they combine elements of their repertoire to generate meanings that are independent of the constituent parts. Finally, there is a consensus that evolution has shaped primate communication as a device to pursue social goals, and it is unclear why humans should have been exempt from this process. In conclusion, contrary to the “cognition over communication” hypothesis, there is evolutionary continuity in mental operations and communicative versatility, suggesting that language evolved gradually from a nonlinguistic precursor in ancestral human population that also underwent an unprecedented increase in relative brain size and mental capacity.
From a linguist’s point of view, the ability to vocalize new sounds may not seem to be a critical component of language. Yet when this ability is impaired, the social and emotional consequences for the affected individual can be severe, as evidenced by those suffering from developmental or injury-related speech disorders. How are we to understand this vocal learning trait, and where should it be placed within a framework for language evolution? Here, I argue that studying the supporting brain pathways that are affected in vocal learning disorders is a good place to start. Since such study is largely limited to noninvasive methods in humans, investigating other animals that possess this rare trait paves the way for a comparative analysis of the molecular, cellular, and synaptic bases of vocal production learning, including human speech. This kind of inquiry can highlight shared evolutionary pathways as well as key detours.
The question of the rules by which left-hemisphere specialization (HS) is established for language is connected to issues related to the origins of language. Exploration of the relationships between variability in linguistic neural networks and HS allows one to examine the relationships between the neural support for language, HS, and the emergence of speech. Studies of aphasiology, presurgical exploration, and intraoperative stimulation have shown a strong correlation between right-handedness and left-hemisphere dominance for language. The hypothesis that the neural bases of language developed in the dominant hemisphere for right-hand motor control coincides with motor theories of language evolution. The fact that exceptions to this rule exist, such as aphasias after right-hemisphere lesions in right-handers or functional imaging observations of healthy right-handers with rightward asymmetries during linguistic tasks, suggests that factors other than handedness may be at play in the development of HS. For example, the observation of increased lateralization of activation for speech listening with increased brain volume suggests that constraints related to the processing speed of speech sounds also play a role in the development of HS. This role of brain volume is consistent with the perceptual theory of the origin of HS, which postulates that language develops in the left hemisphere because of its aptitude for processing rapid temporal signals, which is indispensable for the analysis of speech sounds. Anatomical factors related to this perceptual processing likely combined with the influence of handedness in the course of language and language network evolution.
In this chapter, we explore the relationships between sensorimotor constraints and the organization of sound patterns. An investigation of universal tendencies found in languages of the world reveals some recurrent patterns that are hypothesized to be related to the speaker’s production mechanism and the listener’s perceptual system. Linguistic/phonemic representations would thus be tightly related to physical and peripheral constraints, suggesting that the origins of languages are to be found, at least partly, in the human body.
Organisms’ adaptive success depends on being able to do the right thing with the right kind of thing. This is categorization. Most species can learn categories (1) by direct experience (“induction”). Only human beings can learn categories (2) by word of mouth (“instruction”). Artificial-life simulations have shown the evolutionary advantage of instruction over induction and human electrophysiology experiments have shown that these two radically different ways of acquiring categories still share some common features in our brains today. Graph-theoretic analyses reveal that dictionaries consist of a core of more concrete words that are learned earlier, by direct experience (induction); the meanings of the rest of the dictionary can be learned by definition (instruction) alone, by combining the inductively grounded core words into subject/predicate propositions with truth values. We conjecture that language began when attempts to communicate through miming became conventionalized into arbitrary sequences of shared, increasingly arbitrary category names that made it possible for members of our species to transmit new categories to one another by defining and describing them via propositions (instruction).
Two simple possibilities, one for the origin of sound patterns of languages and one for the origin of their linkage with concepts, are suggested, both based on behaviors observable today. The sound patterns may have been those of present-day babbling, definable as one or more instances of a rhythmic alternation of a closed and open mouth, produced by a mandibular elevation/depression cycle, accompanied by vocal fold vibration, and linguistically meaningless, though giving the perceptual impression of a consonant-vowel (CV) sequence. An example is bababa. Babbling is one of innumerable instances of “fixed action patterns” in nature – innate behavior repertoire components with “form constancy” (e.g. rodent grooming, mating rituals), which provide an initial framework for species-wide motor adaptations. Babbling may have evolved in the manner of many other adaptations noted by the discipline of evolutionary developmental psychology (“Evo Devo”) whereby a genetically determined change in development (ontogeny) in effect “formulates new phylogeny” (Goodman & Coughlin 2000, p. 2445). The simple possibility for the initial linking of sound patterns with concepts is that it occurred in the context of a particular language-related genre present today: “baby talk,” a communicative matrix specific to the parent-infant dyad. The key to understanding this putative development lies in an explanation for the consistent presence across the world’s languages of nasal consonants in maternal terms and non-nasal forms in paternal terms, both in baby talk (e.g. mama, papa) and in the probably derived parental terms of language proper (e.g. mother, father). The maternal term may have been invented when the female parent decided that a mother-directed infant nasalized demand vocalization stood for her, and the paternal term may have developed later with a necessarily perceptually contrastive non-nasal structure.
Contrary to the received idea that globally spread papa/mama words are constantly reinvented by children in different languages, we show here that these words are always inherited from the most ancient stages of their respective families, with the exception of a number of borrowings – which are not innovations, either. We then show that probabilistic calculations aiming to demonstrate that global and other remote etymologies might be mere chance resemblances are invalid, and that chance cannot be reasonably invoked in the cases these calculations deal with. Consequently, the global convergence of papa/mama words can only be a trace of a common heritage of all human languages. Finally, we link this finding with others, indicating that these words must have appeared early, most probably at the very origin of articulate language.
The goals of the present chapter are twofold. On the one hand, it aims to show the potential that studies on grammaticalization offer for reconstructing earlier phases in the evolution of language or languages, that is, phases that are not within the scope of the classical methods of historical linguistics. What distinguishes grammaticalization theory from other linguistic approaches that have been recruited is that it has a diachronic foundation and that the hypotheses proposed on the basis of this theory rest, first, on regularities in linguistic change and, second, on typological generalizations across languages. Building on the reconstruction work proposed in Heine and Kuteva (2007), the chapter looks at some phenomena that were not discussed there. One of these phenomena concerns the role of “linguistic fossils” in discourse organization. The focus of the present paper is on the question of what such possible “fossils” can tell us about the structure that early human language may have had.
The question of the origin of language is difficult to answer since language is involved in a complex way in all human activities. Yet it can be answered if we concentrate on the design properties of the linguistic sign and how they relate to recently discovered properties that are unique to the human brain. Human language is the result of a cascade of consequences from a suite of minute neurological changes that give some human neuronal systems a new “representational” capacity. These changes make sense in evolution, and there is empirical evidence for them. These uniquely human systems of neurons have the capacity to operate offline for input as well as output (Hurley 2008): they can be triggered not only by external events stimulating our perceptual systems but also by brain-internal events; they can also be activated while inhibiting output to any external (motoric) system. These Offline Brain Systems are not specifically designed for language but they provide the crucial property that made it possible for further innovations to occur that led to language; they coincidentally allowed mental states corresponding to elements of the perceptual and conceptual substances of language to meet in our brains to form Saussurean signs. Recursivity derives from the self-organization triggered by the chaotic system that emerged, and required no innovation in the human lineage. Keywords: Offline neuronal systems; Saussurean signs; self-organization; recursivity
In the literature on the origins and the evolution of language, the general assumption is that language started as a restricted code, referred to as “protolanguage.” Since there is no direct access to data manifesting the nature of incipient human language, it is inferred that restricted linguistic codes that are presently available may provide a window on the nature of protolanguage. Pidgin languages feature among the restricted codes that have been identified in the literature (e.g. Bickerton 1984). This chapter bears on the relevance of pidgins (and creoles) (PCs) in the debate on the origins and evolution of language. The first part is dedicated to the Bickertonian approach to pidgin and creole genesis. It presents the main features of this research paradigm, as well as a critical discussion of its various components. The second part reports on the shift in research paradigm in the field of pidgin and creole studies, from the study of language varieties to the study of the processes that yield these language varieties. On the basis of the data and analyses presented in the first two parts of the paper, the third part addresses the question of whether the pidgin/creole sequence actually does provide us with a window on the protolanguage/language sequence. My conclusion is twofold: First, pidgins and protolanguage are not alike. Second, the sequence pidgin/creole does not give us a window on the protolanguage/language sequence. Major arguments include the fact that pidgins, even restricted ones, are too elaborate to serve as analogues of protolanguage, and the fact that PCs are not created ex nihilo.
Computational and mathematical modeling has revealed that cultural evolution may have played a key role in the evolution of language. In this chapter, I explore the hypothesis that processes of cultural transmission have to a large extent shaped language to fit domain-general constraints deriving from the human brain. An implication of this view is that much of the neural hardware involved in language is not specific to it. But how could language have evolved to be as complex as it is without language-specific constraints? Based on computational modeling of the cultural evolution of language, I propose that language has evolved to rely on a multitude of probabilistic information sources for its acquisition, allowing it to be as expressive as possible while still being learnable by domain-general learning mechanisms. Empirical predictions are derived from this perspective regarding the role of phonological cues in the learning of basic aspects of syntax. These predictions are corroborated by results from corpus analyses, computational modeling, and human experimentation, suggesting that the integration of phonological cues with other types of information is integral to the computational architecture of our language capacity. I conclude by considering how computational modeling of cultural evolution can help us understand the evolution of language.
The paper introduces a methodology for developing evolutionary explanations for phenomena observed in human natural languages. The methodology is inspired by Evolutionary Biology but maps the Darwinian selectionist framework to the cognitive, linguistic, and cultural levels.
Modeling the evolution of communication and language is one of the most fascinating and challenging problems in science. Progressing toward this ambitious goal implies explaining how simple communication forms emerged in the first place and how they evolved into structured communication systems with the characteristics of human language. In this chapter, we will illustrate how communication systems originate and evolve in a population of robots that adapt to a given task/environment. The analysis of these synthetic experiments can help us to understand: (i) how communication can emerge in a population of initially noncommunicating individuals, (ii) what conditions represent a prerequisite for the emergence of a robust and stable communication system, (iii) how the communication system changes by eventually increasing in complexity, and (iv) how signals and meanings originate and how they are grounded in robots’ sensorimotor states.
We first address diverse criteria on what a theory of language evolution should explain, focusing on six divides: evolution did/did not yield a Universal Grammar; brain evolution is/is not important; language is to be viewed as speech or multimodal communication; language evolution is/is not best understood solely with reference to tools for communication; we do/do not need a notion of protolanguage as a precursor to language; and protolanguage was/was not in great part holophrastic. We argue against a role for an innate Universal Grammar in language acquisition and language change, and then present a brief case study of the emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language in a few decades. Finally, we present the mirror system hypothesis on the evolution of the language-ready brain locating it within the 6 divides and charting a path for biological evolution supporting mechanisms for simple and complex imitation, pantomime, protosign and protospeech in turn, claiming that this provided an adequate base for true languages to emerge through cultural evolution.