The mystery of the origin of human language

Language can often seem like an obvious and natural given. We use it with ease and continuously throughout our lives, without having made the slightest effort to acquire and learn it as our mother tongue. It stands among the things closest to us, accompanying us from the very first three years of our existence, to the point where human beings have come to define themselves as “animals endowed with speech.” Furthermore, the instrument of its use, as spoken language, is language itself, which is closer to us than the carotid artery. On the other hand, this language so close to us remains what is most distant. What distances us from it is our incomprehension of many of its mysteries and secrets, in particular the reasons and modalities of its appearance and primordial genesis. The question of the “how” and “why” of the emergence of language in human beings has been the subject of numerous works and scientific studies, especially since the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1859. This theory demonstrated, for its proponents, that language constitutes a stage in the process of human evolution and therefore necessarily possesses a “historical” beginning.

Book: Adam’s Tongue

In 2009, a book by linguist Derek Bickerton was published in the United States entitled Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. In this work, which is the subject of this article, the author addresses the problem of the origin of human language from the angle of an innovative theory. It proposes a new “scenario” regarding the factors likely to have presided over the emergence of the very first language, the oldest and most primitive (protolanguage), approximately two million years ago according to the author’s estimation.

Bickerton started from two inseparable questions. The first concerns humans and is stated thus: why and how did language appear in human beings when they were merely a primate species? The second concerns animals: why did language not appear in animals also belonging to the primate order, such as apes? Consequently, any theory claiming to successfully explain the emergence of language in humans must also, according to Bickerton, succeed in explaining why this language did not appear in animals, on pain of being judged erroneous and incomplete.

Animal communication systems

Bickerton acknowledges, like other researchers and as field observations have proven, the existence of “animal communication systems.” In mammals, these systems most often take the form of sounds or cries emitted by these animals, varying according to the situations to which these sounds refer. They allow individuals of the same species to achieve a sort of mutual “understanding,” concerning in particular warnings about predators, the establishment of sexual relations for reproduction, or the strengthening of social bonds among group members. As Bickerton explains, it has been observed that vervet monkeys possess, unlike other simian species, not a single type of call to warn their conspecifics of the approach of a predator, but three “specialized” calls: one signaling an eagle, the second a leopard, and the third a snake.

What characterizes these animal communication systems is that they always relate to what is occurring “here” and “now.” The warning cry against the leopard has no meaning outside the injunction “to flee and climb a tree” at that precise moment and in that specific place. Far from this location and at another time, this alert cry loses all meaning and elicits no reaction from the group of monkeys. It follows that it is impossible to “commemorate” this event the next day in another place by formulating, for example: “That leopard we were warned about yesterday.” This is a major obstacle preventing these communication systems from constituting a true language, because they lack the property of “displacement” inherent to human language. This faculty allows words to evoke an object lacking immediate physical existence in the here and now, and to summon it through the word designating it despite its absence.

It is evident that the first essential step to move from these animal communication systems to human language consists in breaking free from the “prison”—to use Bickerton’s term—of the here and now, by adopting the element of displacement within these systems. Consequently, two questions arise once more: why did the various primate species fail to cross the barrier of the here and now to access the stage of displacement, thus initiating the emergence of language among them? And what made this crossing possible in that branch of primates that was to constitute the human species, thereby allowing the emergence of language as a corollary of this transcendence?

The answer provided by Bickerton is that these early primates had no need for language. All they needed to ensure their survival, reproduction, and the acquisition of capacities making them more fit for life (fitness) was their communication systems. These fulfilled their purpose perfectly, which prompted natural selection to preserve them without intervening to develop or modify them. In contrast, the emergence of language in humans, initiated by the transition to the displacement phase, constituted a vital need upon which their survival and the permanence of their existence depended, once the old communication system had proved inadequate to guarantee this survival and continuity.

What then was this need?

Niche construction theory

It is here that Bickerton’s theory intervenes to explain how “man” reached the stage of displacement, made essential to the existence of a human language under the impulse of a compelling need. He names this approach “niche construction theory.” Its postulate is that every living being is not content merely to endure its living environment and adapt to it; it also strives, to the extent of its capabilities, to act upon it and shape it according to its needs, upon which its survival depends. This mutual interaction of influences and reciprocal adaptations between the living organism and its environment constitutes the process of constructing its ecological niche. Bickerton specifies that this niche is composed of three elements: firstly, the nature of the place where the living being lives (tree, river, sea, desert region, humid land, arid land, etc.); secondly, the nature of its food (meat, plants, or both); thirdly, the mode of obtaining this food (hunting, pastoralism, scavenging). The ecological niche, as Bickerton explains it, is therefore the resultant of the interaction between these three components.

Anthropological studies devoted to human evolution have demonstrated that our distant ancestors, who began to distinguish themselves millions of years ago from other primates sharing a common ancestor, fed mainly on terrestrial plants, leaves, and tree fruits. The consumption of small game meat, which they managed to capture fortuitously and occasionally, was of secondary character. This ecological niche, in the sense defined by Bickerton, was to be disrupted by climatic changes. These caused, particularly in the African regions inhabited by these primates, a scarcity of vegetation, trees, and forests that constituted their food sources. These habitats transformed into arid lands, sparsely dotted with trees and plants, known as the savannah. To ensure survival, humans had to adapt to this new environment by constructing a new ecological niche, after acquiring bipedalism and developing the capacity to use stones for digging, cracking, and defending themselves (the use of stones for digging and cracking is still observed today in certain species of monkeys).

This situation forced it, under the pressure of new constraints in its habitat, to alter its diet and shift from a strictly herbivorous regimen to a forced carnivorous one. Indeed, the flora of the savanna no longer matched its dietary habits acquired over millions of years of feeding on leaves and fruit. Furthermore, foraging in the open spaces of the savanna made it an easy prey for more powerful animals. Consequently, the only available food source in the savanna was animal meat. Yet accessing it was hardly straightforward—either because the prey proved too fast or too strong to capture, or because, once brought down, it was impossible to protect against fiercer and more powerful beasts that would strip away its rightful share. Only one solution remained: scavenging, which meant consuming the carcasses of dead animals. However, securing this food was neither simple nor safe, as other predatory animals claimed these carcasses, threatening humans with extermination and extinction by starvation. Nevertheless, as Bickerton explains, if the number of individuals was sufficiently large, it could allow them to overpower rival and hostile animals and drive them away from the carcass.

The “Magic Moment”

Let us suppose, writes the author, that one of these individuals discovers the carcass of a massive mammoth and wishes to feed on it to appease a voracious hunger, just like any starving animal. Yet other animals, which it is powerless to confront, prevent it from doing so. The solution for this individual, in order to drive away those rival, hostile animals and consume the flesh of the dead mammoth, consists in mobilizing and recruiting a larger number of its peers to travel with it to the feeding site. But how, in the absence of a language for mutual understanding, could one mobilize others by informing them of the presence of food at a specific location so they would go there? This individual may have attempted to emit a sound similar to that of the mammoth while pointing with its hands toward the direction where the carcass lay, as if to say: “There is a dead mammoth rich in meat, follow me.”

The attempt may have succeeded, and its companions followed to discover with surprise a mound of flesh surrounded by beasts that, as soon as they saw the members of the group advancing with resolute steps and hands armed with stones, retreated reluctantly and yielded their place. With the repeated success of this attempt, emitting a sound that simulated the mammoth transformed into a “signifier” for the presence of its meat at the spot toward which the author of the call was guiding companions. Through the fruitful repetition of this operation, that sound ceased to be solely the signifier of mammoth meat and eventually came to designate the carcass of any dead animal. Finally, with prolonged practice of this experience, the members of the group acquired the ability to emit “specialized” and distinct sounds, varying according to the nature of the animal carcasses indicated by those sounds.

Superficially, this process seems to mark no progress compared to animal communication systems. But the great progress, as Bickerton reminds us, lies in the distance between the time and place where the sound signaling a carcass’s presence is emitted, and the time and place where it is actually found when the group members arrive. This means the sound served to designate something that was absent at the very moment it was uttered. This is the notion of displacement explained earlier, which constitutes an inherent condition of human language, making the use of words to designate absent things both possible and effortless. At the beginning, it mattered little whether these sounds, employed by group members to indicate the presence of animal corpses, maintained a natural relationship with the cries of beasts—rather than an arbitrary relationship like in language—since the former were merely an imitation of the latter. What matters at this initial stage, Bickerton insists, is breaking free from the “prison” of the here and now, which opens the royal road toward the emergence of language. In short, language appeared as a need tied to the survival of the human species; without its fulfillment, this species would have vanished and gone extinct. First, there was a need for food. Second, this food (dead animal carcasses) could not be obtained by an isolated individual, but required the mobilization of a larger number of people. Third, to ensure this mobilization, it was necessary to resort to communication that “informs” of the presence of food absent from the here and now. This is what Bickerton calls “the magic moment.” Thus, displacement made its entry into communication, becoming a sine qua non condition of any language.

Yet an objection arises: why did displacement not manifest in other primates so that the theory could be scientifically valid, according to the very criterion set by Bickerton for the truthfulness of any explanation regarding the origin of language? Bickerton replies that these other primates had no need for it, because their environment in trees and forests differed from the savanna that constituted the habitat of the human species following the climate changes in that region of Africa where it lived. Thus, a monkey that discovers an abundance of plants or fruit, for example, has no interest in “informing” its peers of its discovery; its interest dictates on the contrary that the others remain unaware of this food so that it can reserve it for itself. Here vanishes the need for “mobilization” that sparked the first fledgling steps of language in the human species. Why did members of this species not act like monkeys? Because whoever discovers a carcass—unlike someone who finds plants and fruit—does not inform companions out of altruism or kindness of heart, but simply because they are incapable, as already emphasized, of consuming this food alone, which would expose them to starvation likely to carry them off inevitably. It is therefore in their interest, to protect their lives from destruction, to mobilize companions in order to form a force capable of subduing other animals, which will allow them to feed on the provisions they have discovered, thereby guaranteeing their survival and that of their group. This mobilization requires, as we have seen, the use of novel communication that “informs” of something absent from the here and now.

Bickerton comments that at the dawn of language’s emergence, the number of “words” or signs was extremely limited, to the point that one can say it did not exceed a dozen, as he wrote. These “words” were employed, exactly as in animal communication systems, in an isolated manner to express a situation globally, much like a single expression meaning: “There is a lot of meat behind the hill, follow me,” or “Gather stones to confront the hyenas.” At this stage, there was no combination of words to produce meaningful sentences, with terms used autonomously without the slightest link between them. This is what Bickerton calls protolanguage, the earliest, oldest, and most primitive form of language, which likely lasted around a million years, according to his estimate, before the transition to a true language employing proper sentences. But the most important thing, he specified, is not the number of these “words,” but the immense potential offered by displacement (breaking free from the here and now) to create new terms, especially since language, the author asserts, possesses an autocatalytic property of growth.

The Enigma of Human Language Origins in the Light of Science

Bickerton’s Critique of Theories on the Origin of Language

Admittedly, language may appear to rest on biological foundations, as Chomsky and others have argued. The speed and ease with which children acquire language might suggest that it is merely one step among the phases of a child’s biological development. From this perspective, Chomsky points to the existence of an “innate universal grammar” specific to the human species, which would explain man’s innate capacity to acquire language. But if this theory is correct, it should also explain to us, according to Bickerton’s criterion, why other primates do not possess such an innate universal grammar. If such theories, which attribute language to a biological and innate given, are incapable of answering this question, it is because they start from the reality of language as it is today, the acquisition of which by children unquestionably stems from an innate disposition.

However, the real issue does not lie in the current state of language, nor even in what it was tens of centuries ago, but in the reason and manner of its appearance when it was nonexistent. Genes do not determine absolutely and linearly what the behavior of living organisms carrying those genes will be hundreds of thousands of years later or more. If one were to suppose that this behavior had to be strictly identical to that of the same species of organisms for hundreds of thousands of years or more, one would have to deduce, as Bickerton maintains, that all living beings, including man, would not yet have left — and could not possibly do so — the primordial soup that sheltered the very first “historical” genes more than three billion years ago, the date when life appeared on Earth. The genes of living organisms therefore do not store the various behaviors likely to emerge in them hundreds of thousands of years later. They contain only the potentiality for their appearance if the conditions for this manifestation come together — conditions generated by environmental pressures rather than by genes. And when, under the effect of these pressures, a new behavior appears in a living species, proving useful for its survival and the reproduction of its offspring, the factor of natural selection then intervenes, always aiming to preserve the elements best suited to survive and to perfect them, in order to maintain this behavior, improve it, develop it, and perpetuate its practice. Over the years (evaluated in millions), this “acquired” behavior will become an innate behavior and an instinct that genes determine and reproduce, considering “that instinct — as Bickerton wrote — is simply behavior stamped into the genes” (Instinct is simply behavior stamped into the genes, page 106), or as he wrote elsewhere, that “instinct is just fossilized behavior, regardless of whether we’re talking of ants or humans” (Instinct is just fossilized behavior, regardless of whether we’re talking of ants or humans, page 142).

It is precisely through this process that human language passed during its course of evolution. If the genetic difference between man and the chimpanzee is less than 1.5% today, they unquestionably carried at the origin — that is, before diverging into two distinct species — the same genes by virtue of belonging to the same stock. Consequently, if language had had a biological foundation dictated by genes, it would have appeared in the ape just as it appeared in man, since they carried similar genes. But when language arose — in its initial primitive form, constrained by the natural habitat occupied by the human species, namely the savanna — as an innovative behavior useful for survival and reproduction, natural selection took charge of developing it, improving it, growing it, and reproducing it, which made of it, after hundreds of thousands of years (or more than a million years), a sort of innate disposition facilitating its acquisition and learning.

Among the criticisms leveled by Bickerton against Chomsky is the one concerning the latter’s idea that the emergence of language is the fruit of man’s capacity for thinking. Consequently, if man is a “talking animal,” it is because he thought beforehand. This is a thesis that Bickerton rejects and refutes, demonstrating that this theory granting primacy to thought as the cause of the appearance of language, while it seems proven today to the extent that one cannot dissociate the use of language from thought, proves completely false before the appearance of that very language. On the contrary, the existence of the latter was the prerequisite for the exercise of thought. Why? Because thought is based on the use of concepts, and these latter depend on the use of words as vehicles for these concepts, which presupposes the prior existence of a language using these terms. Consequently, Chomsky adopts, according to Bickerton, an idealist posture considering thought as prior to language and constituting the cause of its emergence, without advancing any argument other than qualifying language as a biological given, while omitting to explain how it arose in man to the exclusion of other primates.

As for the theory of the “big brain” purportedly specific to man, which would have constituted a prerequisite, from this perspective, for the emergence of human language, Bickerton considers it a fallacy to which he devoted a passage entitled: “The big-brain fallacy.” It is a reasoning error because brain size, the author explains, was not the cause of the appearance of language, but rather its consequence. This is precisely what he sought to express in the subtitle of his work: “How man made language, and how language made man.” If man shaped language out of a vital need for mobilization, as we have observed, where then does the shaping of man by language manifest itself? It translates into the enrichment, improvement, and development of his thought, which was at the origin of the increase in the size of his brain, which came to require a greater number of neurons demanded by cognitive operations. It also translates into everything that man has produced as thought, culture, civilization, urbanism, beliefs, sciences, inventions, and weaponry, as well as everything he has caused as wars, pollution, exhaustion of nature, and destruction of its resources. None of this would have existed if language had not first seen the light of day.

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