How Language Began

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How Language Began by Daniel L. Everett

Controversial and revisionist are two words that came to my mind while reading this book.

I can't claim any deep specialty in this area but I've read a few books on the subject of linguistics and thought I was keeping abreast of the subject. I thought that Noam Chomsky was widely accepted as setting the benchmark for linguistic study and that the idea that language developed as a result of a genetic mutation in the last 50,000 years was equally accepted. Likewise, I read Steven Pinker's “The Language Instinct” and I was sold on the notion that the human brain has a component for handling language.

Daniel L. Everett's book “How Language Began” challenges those complacent beliefs. Everett comes across as a one-man wrecking crew to set things straight. Everett sets forth his thesis in the preface:

“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 50–100,000 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 wouldn't 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.”

Everett argues his thesis in great detail, which results in this book being a soup to nuts survey of linguistics, running from anthropology to historical linguistics to the mechanics of how words are formed by the human vocal apparatus.

Everett's position on Homo Erectus is both interesting and idiosyncratic. Everett argues cogently that H. Erectus must have had speech capabilities in order to accomplish the things that they accomplished, particularly building sea going vessels capable of taking their species to offshore islands beyond the site of land. Everett also discounts the trustworthiness of scholarship that identifies other homo species:

“According to some classifications, there were, soon after and before erectus, other species of Homo co-existing or existing in close succession – Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rudolfensis among others. But, again, most of these various species of Homo are ignored here, with the focus kept on Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. Most other Homo species are murky, maybe nothing more than variants of Homo erectus. However, the story of human language evolution changes in no significant way, whether erectus and ergaster were the same or different species.”

Homo Sapien is simply an improved model of Homo Erectus.

Everett offers this on the sophistication of Erectus:

“This view of human cooperation in erectus is strongly supported by the archaeological record. As erectus wandered through the Levant, near the Jordan between the Dead Sea to the south and the Hula Valley to the north, they came to stop at the site known today as Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. At this site, going back at least 790,000 years, there is evidence for Acheulean tools, Levallois tools, evidence of controlled fire, organised village life, huts that housed socially specialised tasks of different kinds and other evidence of culture among Homo erectus. Erectus may have stopped here on the way out of Africa. Erectus technology was impressive. They built villages that manifested what almost appears to be central planning, or at least gradual construction under social guidance, as in Gesher Benot Ya'aqov. This is clear evidence of cultural values, organised knowledge and social roles. But such villages are just one example of erectus's technological and organisational innovation.”

I didn't know that.

Communication exists in sub-homo species. Non-humans use indexes and icons, non-arbitrary referents that mean one thing only. Humans use symbols. For Everett, the human achievement was a brain capable of using symbols and engaging in recursive thinking. Language is not a product of the wiring of the brain any more than a hammer is; both language and a hammer are inventions or tools of the human mind. Everett notes:

“A startling conclusion emerges from deficits affecting language: There are no language-only hereditary disorders. And the reason for that is predicted by the theory of language evolution here – namely that there could not be such a deficit because there is no language-specific part of the brain. Language is an invention. The brain is no more specialised for language than for toolmaking, though over time both have affected the development of the brain in general ways that make it more supportive of these tasks.”

This insight comes after a long discussion of the kinds of ways that things can go wrong in the human ability to talk. Everett's point is well-made. We don't say that a hammer must be “wired” into the brain because someone without thumbs can't use one. There is no genetic condition that effects language - no one is born without an ability to comprehend verbs except insofar as they can also not comprehend nouns and prepositions. Likewise, as a practicing Linguist, Everett has seen far too many grammars to accept the notion that there is a universal language.

For readers of anthropology and linguistics this is a very useful work because it shows how much is still open to debate. I think that for someone looking for a survey of linguistics this is a helpful and interesting book. If you are like me and are intrigued by the “gosh-wow!” ideas of “deep history” and “human evolution,” this book is well-worth the investment.

On the other hand, it is not particularly written for the lay reader. Everett spins off idea after idea and the reader has to stay on his toes to keep up. Also, there is a lot of dense and dry material. For example, the chapters on the mechanics of language are important (and I found them interesting insofar as Everett shared his personal experiences in the field), but I found my enthusiasm for the subject lagging at times. I suspect that for others with less background, these are chapters that can and will be skipped.

Obviously, on the whole, I found Everett's thesis captivating and his arguments cogent.

PSB