How Did We Learn to Talk? We Can’t Say for Sure.

Dennis Duncan

If you stand on the rock of Edinburgh Castle on a clear day and look due north toward the Firth of Forth, you can make out the small island of Inchkeith, about three miles out to sea. It was to this island, in 1493, that James IV banished two infant children, with only a mute nurse for company, to be raised in silent isolation. The king hoped that, when the children came of age, this experiment would reveal the original, Edenic language of Adam and Eve, uncontaminated by modern chatter.

The results, let’s say, were inconclusive. An early historian, writing in Scots, offers contemporary gossip — “some sayis they spak goode hebrew” — before quickly disavowing any firm opinion on the matter.

This is just one of several near-identical language deprivation experiments reportedly carried out by various despotic rulers over the centuries. Many of these stories are probably apocryphal, but they point to an ongoing curiosity that is very real. Where did language first come from, and what was the first language like? These questions are addressed by archaeologist Steven Mithen in “The Language Puzzle.”

Speculation on the matter was so rife, and often so wild, that on March 8, 1866, the Société de Linguistique de Paris issued a set of statutes which notably declared that they would no longer enter into any communication concerning the origins of language. This ban has been credited with putting an ancient field of inquiry into hibernation for over a century — an exaggeration, perhaps, but one that carries a germ of truth.

Many scholars had come to realize that the question of how language had evolved was itself so inherently complex, and crossed so many of the specialist disciplines into which academia divides itself, that anyone claiming to have the answer was likely to be a quack.

Since the end of the last century, however, we have begun to see serious, multiple-component approaches to the topic that draw together evidence from different branches of learning. Mithen has a useful metaphor for the way in which the question must be tackled: The puzzle in his title is a jigsaw. The picture we are after, of language evolution, will only reveal itself if we place all the different pieces in the right configuration, bringing together evidence from linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology and ethology (the science of animal behavior).

What King James didn’t realize — but what should seem obvious to us in a post-Darwin world — is that language did not appear fully formed as one item from a small menu of available options. “Fully modern language,” as Mithen calls it, is the endpoint of an evolutionary process that stretches back to the lip-smacks, pant-hoots and kiss-squeaks of chimpanzees and other primates. Along the way, it acquires the possibility of combining multiple noises into phrases, the capacities to represent things that are not immediately present and to use metaphor.

At the same time, developments in the vocal tract allowed for a vastly increased palette of potential sounds. English uses 44 distinct phonemes; the Taa language of Botswana has 144.

A key piece of Mithen’s jigsaw is the divergence of hominids and chimpanzees. Fossil evidence of variations in brain size and vocal tract shape between Homo sapiens, Neanderthal man, Homo erectus and so on down the family tree allows for the speculative dating of some of those linguistic leaps. Mithen is especially good at describing humankind’s differentiation and migration over the last three million years, and this early chapter is a tour de force of terse, fascinating clarity.

The same cannot be said of all of them, unfortunately. In Mithen’s jigsaw there are a lot of specialist disciplines that necessarily need to be unpacked for the general reader. Sometimes, however, he provides more detail than we subsequently need. “The Language Puzzle” contains many memorable passages, but I will struggle to recall exactly how nucleotides model proteins, or the precise distinctions between the hand tools of the Lower Paleolithic period.

Occasionally, one senses that the puzzle pieces have been clipped slightly or jammed in to fit the picture; many of these disciplines have not settled into consensus to quite the extent that the author suggests.

Take the idea of sound symbolism, the proposition that certain sounds in words have a non-arbitrary relationship to their meaning: the onomatopoeia. Certainly this idea, discredited for most of the 20th century, now has a significant body of well-evidenced support. Nevertheless, if one were to ask a straw poll of academic linguists how seriously they take sound symbolism, one would find that the matter is by no means as unanimously resolved as Mithen needs it to be. But by and large, he is an honest commentator.

Mithen is not averse to taking sides in debates that are still open. Phrases like “I am aligned with” or “in my opinion” pepper the text. As a consequence, the picture revealed in the final chapter is only a hypothetical one — “my best shot,” as Mithen puts it. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable, vivid set piece: a montage that runs from the barks and coos of forest-dwelling primates to the grammatical written language you are reading now.

No doubt, aspects of Mithen’s picture will need to be redrawn. It is, by his own admission, only the snapshot of a moment in a debate that will continue as the underlying sciences come into greater definition. Thankfully, this time the learned societies of Paris will not forbid the discussion from continuing.