Daniel L. Everett - How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention

How

Language

Began

The Story of Humanitys
Greatest Invention

Daniel L. Everett

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

Independent Publishers Since 1923

New York London

Language is not an instinct, based on genetically transmitted knowledge coded in a discrete cortical language organ. Instead it is a learned skill that is distributed over many parts of the human brain.

Philip Lieberman

For John Davey,
mentor and friend

The clade of humanity

Primate phylogenetic tree

The hominin family tree

Homo erectus

Olduwan tool kit

Language is a nexus

John said that Bill saw Irving

Makapansgat manuport/pebble/cobble

Erfoud manuport

A Schningen spear

Erectus shell etchings from Java

Olduwan tool kit

Acheulean tools

Levalloisian tools

Venus of Berekhat Ram

Midsagittal view of the brain

Ventral view of the brain

Dorsal view of the brain

Cytoarchitecture/Brodmann areas

The larynx

The International Phonetic Alphabet

Southern California English vowels

Vowel spectrogram

Yesterday, what did John give to Mary in the library?

Extended duality of patterning making a sentence

Syllables and sonority

Morphosyntactic hierarchy

Types of language by word type

Grammatical structure

The gesture continuum

The growth point

The big boy

Shannons conduit metaphor of communication

Picture Credits

Figure 5: Copyright John Gurche; Figures 6, 13, 14, 15: Didier Descouens (CC-BY-SA-4.0) Museum of Toulouse; Figures 9, 10: Copyright Robert G. Bednarik; Figure 11: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian Institution; Figure 12: Wim Lustenhouwer, VU University Amsterdam; Figures 17, 18, 19: From Blumenfeld: Neuroanatomy through Clinical Cases, Second Edition, Sinauer Associates, Inc., 2010; Figure 20: Reprinted from Neuroanatomy of Language Regions of the Human Brain, Michael Petrides, Cytoarchitecture, Pages 89138, Copyright 2014, with permission from Elsevier; Figure 21: www.theodora.com/anatomy, used with permission; Figure 22: http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-chart, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Copyright 2015 International Phonetic Association; Figure 33: Figure 4.2.3, Gesture and Thought, David McNeill, 2005, University of Chicago Press.

AROUND 1920 A RATTLESNAKE killed my great-grandfather outside of Lubbock, Texas. Walking home from church with his family across a cotton field, Great-grandfather Dungan was telling his children to watch out for snakes in the field when he was suddenly struck in the thigh. His daughter, Clara Belle, my grandmother, told me that he suffered for three days, crippled in pain and screaming, until he finally expired in his bedroom at the back of the house.

One did not have to be at the scene of the incident to know that, because it was a rattlesnake, it must have warned my great-grandfather before striking. But, considering the outcome, there must have been a communication failure between Papa Dungan and the snake. My grandmother saw the snake bite her father and she talked about the event a great deal during my childhood. She often remembered the moments when the snake was warning her father, as if the beast would use actual words if it only could. However, people who know that rattlesnakes communicate often confuse their tail shaking with language, leading them to anthropomorphise and evoke human terms, such as saying they tell threatening creatures to stay away by shaking the keratin-formed, interlocking, hollow parts at the end of their tail to produce a loud rattle. Though that action is not technically language, the snakes rattling carries important information nonetheless. My great-grandfather paid a heavy price for failing to heed that message.

Rattlesnakes arent the only animal communicators, of course. In fact, all animals communicate, receiving and transmitting information to other animals, whether of their own or different species. As I will later explain, however, we should resist labelling the rattle of a snake language. A rattlesnakes repertoire is splendidly effective, but for severely limited purposes. No snake can tell you what it wants to do tomorrow or how it feels about the weather. Messages like those require language, the most advanced form of communication earth has yet produced.

The story of how humans came to have language is a mostly untold one, full of invention and discovery, and the conclusions that I come to through that story have a long pedigree in the sciences related to language evolution anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, palaeoneurology, archaeology, biology, neuroscience and primatology. Like any scientist, however, my interpretations are informed by my background, which in this case are my forty years of field research on languages and cultures of North, Central and South America, especially with hunter-gatherers of the Brazilian Amazon. As in my latest monograph on the intersection of psychology and culture, Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is innate, or inborn.

As far back as the work of psychologist Kurt Goldstein in the early twentieth century, researchers have denied that there are language-exclusive cognitive disorders. The absence of such disorders would seem to suggest that language emerges from the individual and not merely from language-specific regions of the brain. And this in turn supports the claim that language is not a relatively recent development, say 50100,000 years old, possessed exclusively by Homo sapiens. My research suggests that language began with Homo erectus more than one million years ago, and has existed for 60,000 generations.

As such, the hero of this story is Homo erectus, upright man, the most intelligent creature that had ever existed until that time. Erectus was the pioneer of language, culture, human migration and adventure. Around three-quarters of a million years before Homo erectus transmogrified into Homo sapiens, their communities sailed almost two hundred miles (320 kilometres) across open ocean and walked nearly the entire world.

Erectus communities invented symbols and language, the sort that wouldnt seem out of place today. Although their languages differed from modern languages in the quantity of their grammatical tools, they were human languages. Of course, as generations came and went, Homo sapiens unsurprisingly improved on what erectus had done, but there are languages still spoken today that are reminiscent of the first ever spoken, and they are not inferior to other modern languages.

The Latin word Homo means man. Therefore, any creature of the Homo genus is a human being. In two-word Latin biological nomenclature, a genus is the broader classification of which a species is a variant. Thus, Homo erectus describes a species erectus, standing that is a member of the human, Homo, genus. Homo erectus thus means standing man. This is the first species of humans. Homo neanderthalensis means Neander Valley man, based on the fact that its fossils were first discovered in the Neander Valley of Germany. Homo sapiens means wise man, and suggests, erroneously as we see, that modern humans (we are all Homo sapiens