Origins of Language
Constraints on hypotheses
Sverker Johansson
University of Jönköping
John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Sverker Johansson
Origins of Language : Constraints on hypotheses / Sverker Johansson.
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Research, issn 1566 7774 ; v. 5)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Language and languages--Origin. 2. Human evolution. 3.
Biolinguistics.
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8
CHAPTER 10
WHY DID LANGUAGE EVOLVE?
In order to understand the evolution of language, we must advance our under-
standing of the purpose of language, and purpose in an evolutionary context is
synonymous with selective advantage (Ganger & Stromswold, 1998). Different
hypotheses concerning the original selective advantage that drove the evolution of
language will be discussed in this chapter.
Evolution of complex and specialized features does not occur without being
driven by some selective pressure some evolutionary advantage accruing to
those who possess the feature. As discussed in Section 9.3, it is well established
that language is such a complex and specialized feature (Pinker & Bloom, 1990).
But what was the crucial advantage conferred by language, that drove its evolu-
tion? One may think that the advantages of having a language are obvious as
Lieberman (2003a) points out it is difficult to identify any aspect of human be-
havior (...) that would not profit from [...] language, ... (p. 670) but that would
instead raise the question of why only humans have acquired it, why not a lot of
other animals as well, if it is so useful?
Szathmáry (2001) identifies two possible explanations for the uniqueness of an
apparently useful feature, such as language:
1. Variation-limited: The requisite combination of mutations has a very low prob-
ability of occurring.
2. Selection-limited: The feature will bring a selective advantage only under very
rare circumstances.
The first possibility is in principle conceivable in the case of language, but it would
mean that the appearance of language in the human lineage, rather than that of
chimps or cockroaches, is a matter of pure chance. In that case, the problem of
language origins is not amenable to analysis, and not very interesting in any case
(though Szathmáry (2001) calls the possibility amusing ). The miraculous salta-
tionist models of language origins formerly favored by e.g., Chomsky (1988) and
Bickerton (1990), discussed in Section 9.5, belong in this category.
The second possibility is more interesting, and does appear more plausible, as
humans have many other unusual features, that may provide the unique circum-
194 Origins of language
stances that would favor language emergence. In that case, the problem at hand
is to identify whatever it was in human history, that made language particularly
advantageous for our ancestors, but not for the other apes. This has close parallels
with hypotheses concerning why our brains are so much larger, discussed in Sec-
tion 5.3.1. The different levels of evolution, as well as the features and limitations
of evolutionary processes, reviewed in Chapter 3, should also be kept in mind.
A particularly common pitfall here is the teleological scenario that our an-
cestors evolved language because they needed it for some purpose or other. Future
utility of a trait is never valid as an explanation for its evolution, as this entails
backwards causation. Tenable hypotheses must be structured around selection
scenarios, instead why did people with incipient stages of language have a
reproductive advantage over people without?
The issues raised in Section 6.3 must also be considered the selective ad-
vantage of language must actually benefit the spread of the speaker s genes, not
just the general welfare of the group. Hypotheses of language evolution cannot be
based exclusively on how information recipients benefit from language, without
explaining how that benefit spreads back to the speaker.
Another important aspect, related to the previous points, is the context in which
language evolved. Before the advent of agriculture (which certainly postdates lan-
guage), humans lived as hunter-gatherers, in modest-sized tribes, presumably with
a lifestyle and social structure not vastly different from that of the few remaining
present-day hunter-gatherers. The chimpanzee lifestyle can reasonably be called
hunter-gatherer as well, though it is quite different from that of human hunter-
gatherers. Thus it appears not unreasonable to assume that language evolved in
a hunter-gatherer context, in tribes with a social structure somewhere in between
that of chimps and modern hunter-gatherers. This would be the Environment of
Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA), the Stone Age environment for which evolu-
tion has shaped us the time since we abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is
much too short for any substantial evolutionary changes (Daly & Wilson, 1999;
Nesse & Williams, 1994; Byrne, 2000, but see also Irons (1998)). Reasonable hy-
potheses of language evolution must postulate that language carried some crucial
advantage for people in such an EEA society advantages that language confers
only in modern industrialized (or even farming) societies are irrelevant.
Numerous hypotheses have been proposed as answers to these questions about
human language evolution, a selection of which will be evaluated here. In order
to provide some structure and overview, the hypotheses will be classified under
several categories, though the boundaries between the categories are sometimes
fluid.
Why did language evolve? 195
10.1 Hunting
An obvious starting point is to postulate that language evolved for the purpose of
communication, and that the main selective advantage gained by improved com-
munication was enhanced coordination of group activities. Prominent among the
group activities discussed in this context is hunting, which has played a central
role in many scenarios for human evolution (Landau, 1991; Sagan, 1977), but
more general resource acquisition activities can be included here as well (Cziko,
1995). Apart from communication during hunts, the hunting argument has also
been connected with the teaching argument of Section 10.4 below:
The quality education needed to become an expert Pleistocene hunter could not
do without a complex form of information transmittal interaction in which the tran-
scendence of the here and now, [...] played a key role. (Roebroeks, 2001, p. 451,
emphasis in original).
Hunting-related communication could be a significant force in our evolution, only
if hunting was actually of major importance for our subsistence. Contrary to this,
it is commonly asserted that most hunter-gatherers, at least in the tropical areas
relevant to early human evolution (Ragir, 2000), don t get nearly as much food
from hunting as from gathering. Kaplan et al. (2000), however, contest this claim,
and review a number of studies of actual calories hunted and gathered by members
of various tribes on average, an adult hunter produces twice as many calories
per day as an adult gatherer. Kaplan et al. (2000) furthermore trace the common
knowledge that hunting is unimportant back to a single study of questionable
generality (Lee, 1979, cited in Kaplan et al. (2000)).
The Inuit, who live in an Arctic environment with little plant food to gather,
incontrovertibly get most of their food from hunting, and very likely so did the
Neanderthals of Ice Age Europe, for similar reasons. Isotopic evidence from Ne-
anderthal fossils indicates that meat from large herbivores was a major part of their
diet, which implies that hunting was an economically vital activity (Richards et al.,
2000; Bocherens et al., 2001). But living in a glacial environment is a very late
development in human history, well after H sapiens and Neanderthals had gone
their separate ways, so an Arctic origin of language does not appear plausible.
Nevertheless, with the evidence presented by Kaplan et al. (2000) it would ap-
pear that hunting is highly significant for modern human hunter-gatherers, and by
implication has been important for at least the later part of our evolution, so that a
role for hunting in the evolution of language is not excluded on these grounds.
There are, however, a few problems with the notion that hunter coordination
was a major driving force in language evolution. To begin with, modern humans
do not use all that much language during a hunt it is a rather silent activity
(Dunbar, 2003b).
Furthermore non-human social carnivores manage to coordinate their collabo-
rative hunts without using language (Brinck & Gärdenfors, 2003). This of course
196 Origins of language
includes wolves and lions but also chimpanzees (Mitani & Watts, 1999; Plum-
mer & Stanford, 2000; Mitani & Watts, 2001; Stanford, 1998) and orangutans,
who do hunt on occasion (Utami & van Hoof, 1997). The observation that chim-
panzees hunt caused considerable surprise when first reported by Goodall (1963)
until then, our cousins had been regarded as peaceful frugivores in stark con-
trast with the bloody history of Man (Dart, 1953; Ardrey, 1961). Hunting by other
carnivores may not be so relevant in the present context, but hunting by our nearest
relatives certainly is.
Orangutan hunting is rare and mostly opportunistic, but chimpanzee hunting
appears more organized and purposeful. Chimpanzee hunts take place in modest-
sized groups (almost exclusively male),1 and give the impression of being col-
lectively planned and coordinated in advance. The communication systems that
chimps have in the wild are to all appearances perfectly adequate for hunting pur-
poses, as evidenced by a hunting success rate exceeding 50% (Mitani & Watts,
2001), which compares favorably with human hunting prowess.
There is some evidence that chimpanzees in more open savannah habitats hunt
more often than their rainforest relatives, as do savannah-dwelling baboons (Do-
mínguez Rodrigo, 2002). This is of some interest in the context of human history,
as our early ancestors also appear to have lived in fairly open habitats, woodland
or savannah rather than rainforest.
Gathering may well be as plausible as hunting as an explanation for language,
since gathering in modern human hunter-gatherers relies on an encyclopedic knowl-
edge of thousands of edible plants and other items,2 the communication and dis-
cussion of which may well be highly advantageous (Pinker & Bloom, 1990). And
gathering, particularly in a savannah environment, involves much more than just
picking fruits off branches a major part of a typical human gatherer diet con-
sists of tubers and other underground plant parts, difficult to find and extract, and
commonly laced with noxious chemicals, requiring extensive preparation to render
them edible (Ragir, 2000), multiplying the demands on learning and thus commu-
nication.
As noted earlier, a plausible hypothesis of language evolution should explain
not only why our ancestors did evolve language, but also why the chimp ancestors
1
Chimpanzees do not hunt out of economic necessity hunting is less common when fruit is scarce
(Watts & Mitani, 2002). Instead, the evidence indicates that the main function of chimpanzee hunting is
male bonding and coalition building (Mitani & Watts, 2001; Stanford, 1998). It is not entirely obvious
how this differs from hunting among humans in modern Western countries. O Connell et al. (2002)
argue that early hominid meat consumption followed a similar pattern.
2
Note, however, the counterargument of Alvard (2003):
Language could not have evolved initially to facilitate the passage of a complex database of knowledge
because, in the absence of language to produce it, the database did not yet exist. (p. 143).
This is a valid point, or would be if no such database existed in our non-speaking relatives but the
corresponding database that chimpanzees possess is not entirely negligible (Huffman, 1997), and the
extension of the database that language makes possible, might well contribute to the selective value of
language once it has evolved.
Why did language evolve? 197
didn t. And in the case of gathering it is not obvious that there should be any
notable difference between the two, though the human reliance on underground
food mentioned above is a possibility. Concerning hunting, chimpanzees do hunt,
as mentioned earlier, but they don t do it very often. Meat is regarded by them as
a rare delicacy, but it does not contribute significantly to their subsistence, unlike
the situation for human hunter-gatherers.
It is a matter of some controversy when hunting became economically im-
portant for our hominid ancestors. There is evidence for meat-eating and meat-
processing quite early in the fossil record isotopic hints of a dietary shift are
found in 3-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus (Sponheimer & Lee-Thorp,
1999), and bones with cut marks from stone tools first occur around 2.5 mil-
lion years ago (Semaw, 2000) and become common from about 2 million years
ago (Brantingham, 1998; Domínguez Rodrigo, 1997; Capaldo, 1997; Fernández-
Jalvo et al., 1999b), in the context of Homo habilis or possibly Homo ergaster
(O Connell et al., 2002).
But evidence of meat-eating need not be evidence of active hunting. It is not
obvious to what extent animals were actively hunted by early hominids, and to
what extent meat was scavenged from carcasses killed by carnivores. Scaveng-
ing is argued on archaeological (O Connell et al., 2002) and ecological grounds
(Brantingham, 1998), whereas cut marks are invoked both to support hunting (Do-
mínguez Rodrigo, 1997) and scavenging (Capaldo, 1997). One should perhaps
also make a distinction here between active scavenging driving away a preda-
tor from a fresh kill and passive scavenging picking over carcasses after
the primary predator has left them. Active scavenging is archeologically difficult
to distinguish from hunting Domínguez Rodrigo & Pickering (2003) conclude
that hominids around 1.5 million years ago got their meat either through hunting or
active (but not passive) scavenging. But Domínguez Rodrigo (2002) was skeptical
about early hominid active scavenging, given the risks involved in confronting a
lion or saber-toothed cat over its fresh kill.
It may be relevant to note here that chimpanzees get all or almost all of their
meat from active hunting according to Plummer & Stanford (2000) they never
scavenge, but Mitani & Watts (1999) and Domínguez Rodrigo (2002) say that
they do scavenge occasionally. According to O Connell et al. (2002) they engage
in active but not passive scavenging. Studies of the remains of chimpanzee meals
known to be the result of active hunting, like Tappen & Wrangham (2000), may
yield clues to the interpretation of fossil bone assemblages.
An argument against scavenging, at least of the passive variety, is that unlike
e.g., jackals we get sick if we eat rotting meat. The digestion of humans, and
probably primates in general, is not adapted to handle the bacteria and toxins in
decomposing carrion (Ragir, 2001), which it ought to have been if passive scav-
enging had been important in our history.
198 Origins of language
Even in the case of Neanderthals and early modern humans, there have been
some arguments about whether they hunted or scavenged, but more recent evi-
dence clearly supports hunting in these cases (Marean, 1998; Milo, 1998; Richards
et al., 2000; Bocherens et al., 2001). As a matter of fact, it appears that Ne-
anderthals hunted more than modern humans, who had a broader diet (Richards
et al., 2001). Under the hunting hypothesis this would imply that Neanderthals,
who according to Balter et al. (2001) obtained 97% of their sustenance from meat,
would have had even more reason to evolve language than we did.
For a recent review of the issue of hunting versus scavenging among early hu-
mans, see Domínguez Rodrigo (2002).
Regardless of whether the meat was hunted or scavenged, there is evidence
for a major dietary shift in early hominids, somewhere between 3 and 2 million
years ago, from a diet similar to that of chimpanzees, to one including significant
amounts of meat from larger animals. It is intriguing that the timeframe coincides
with the emergence of the genus Homo and the first stone tools, as well as the
start of human brain growth. New communicative needs associated with this new
lifestyle are not ruled out as explanations for language. But communication about
scavenging or gathering is at least as likely as communication about hunting.
A variation on the hunting theme is the proposal of Stanford (1999, cited in
Heesy (2000)), that the triggering factor was the social machinations involved in
meat-sharing in the group, rather than in the demands of hunting per se. Closely
related is the dual economy, the division of labor between hunting men and gath-
ering women, with the organized cooperation and exchange of food that it entails,
invoked by Quiatt (2001) as an explanation for the emergence of language. But
both of these proposals belong rather in Section 10.5 below, as special cases of the
social hypotheses discussed there.
Another variation is that of Deacon (1997), where male cooperative hunting in
conjunction with our mating system drove the evolution of language see Section
10.3 below.
10.2 Tool making
Tool use and tool making is not entirely limited to humans. The making of tools is
reported only for chimpanzees (Savage & Wyman, 1844, cited in Whiten & Mc-
Grew (2001)), bonobos3 (Boesch & Boesch, 1990), elephants (Hart et al., 2001),
and crows (Stone, 2002; Hunt & Gray, 2004), but numerous species have been
found to use tools, including all the great apes (Sugiyama, 1994; Nakamichi,
1998; Peters, 2001; O Malley & McGrew, 2000; Fox & bin Muhammad, 2002;
van Schaik et al., 2003b) and some monkeys (van Schaik et al., 1999; Westergaard
3
Bonobos can even be taught to make stone tools (McNeil, 1996; Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994).
Why did language evolve? 199
et al., 1998; Worch, 2001; Hauser et al., 2002b), as well as numerous others, from
spiders to naked mole rats (Shuster & Sherman, 1998). Chimpanzees even use
tool-composites, several tools used in conjunction to achieve a goal (Sugiyama,
1997), and adapt their tool making to the task at hand (Humle & Matsuzawa,
2002). That chimpanzees use tools has been known at least since the 19th century
(Savage & Wyman, 1844), but the uniqueness of human tool use was nevertheless
still argued a century later (Oakley, 1956, cited in Ambrose (2001)).
Still, tools do appear to have played a major role in human evolution, as re-
viewed by e.g., Schick & Toth (1993) or Ambrose (2001), and are frequently in-
voked as one of the factors that drove the evolution of hominid brains and intelli-
gence,4 a hypothesis gaining some support from the complexity found in the brain
activity of modern humans during stone-tool manufacture (Stout et al., 2000). This
argument is commonly connected with the belief that the early tools were mainly
hunting weapons, a belief not borne out by observations of chimpanzees, who use
tools regularly for gathering, but rarely for hunting (Tappen & Wrangham, 2000).
As for the driving forces behind tool-use evolution itself, see the review of van
Schaik et al. (1999).
A few authors, such as Gibson (1990, cited in King (1996)), have invoked tool
making as a driving force also behind the evolution of language. But it is not
entirely obvious just why language would be of such selective advantage for tool
making. In general, flint knapping is a solitary activity in which language plays
little role even among those modern humans who still make stone tools. Teaching it
is typically done by demonstration rather than verbal instruction (Dunbar, 2003b).
It appears implausible to have improved social communication evolving due to
pressures that have little to do with social communication.
The oldest recognizable stone tools are about 2.6 million years old (Semaw et
al., 2003), and bone tools of comparable age have been found as well (Backwell
& d Errico, 2001; Shipman, 2001). It is not known whether less durable tools,
like wooden sticks, were also used by early hominids, as they are by chimpanzees,
since such tools are rarely preserved;5 the diversity of tools in the fossil record
is likely to be underestimated. Likewise, the use of unmodified natural stones as
tools is difficult to recognize.
Pseudo-archeological excavation studies of known sites of chimpanzee tool use,
like that of Mercader et al. (2002), may well provide the means to recognize the
remains of more primitive tool use among our earliest ancestors (Vogel, 2002;
Bower, 2002). Mercader et al. (2002) studied the remains of chimpanzee nut
cracking, their main use of stone tools. Similar remains of nut cracking do oc-
4
But see Bridgeman (2002) and Simćo (2002) who caution against assuming that improved tool man-
ufacture necessarily has a biological basis cultural evolution is a distinct possibility as well.
5
The oldest known wooden tools are less than 400,000 years old (Klein, 2000), in the probable context
of Homo heidelbergensis.
200 Origins of language
cur in the human archeological record, but do not predate the oldest regular stone
axes (Goren-Inbar et al., 2002).
Hand anatomy may provide another clue to when tool use first became impor-
tant. Chimpanzee hands are a compromise between the demands of quadrupedal
walking, tree climbing, and object manipulation, and are not optimal for any of
them for example, the chimpanzees do not have the forceful human precision
grip with the thumb and index finger. But already Australopithecus afarensis may
have had it (Alba et al., 2003; Tocheri et al., 2003), well before the appearance of
stone tools in the archaeological record, and later australopithecines almost cer-
tainly did (Aiello, 1994). It is, however, unclear whether the hand modifications
are due to selective pressure for tool making, or simply due to relaxed selection for
tree climbing and knuckle walking.
For the first million years or so, a simple stone tool kit called Oldowan was used;
a typical Oldowan tool is shown in Figure 10.1. Interpretations differ on whether
there was any significant change through time, with de la Torre et al. (2003) and
Kimura (2002) supporting change and Semaw (2000) stasis. The Oldowan indus-
try is mainly associated with Homo habilis (Kimbel et al., 1996), though tool-using
robust australopithecines remains a possibility, according to Susman (1994; 1998),
and both Parker (2002) and Semaw et al. (2003) connect the earliest tools with Aus-
tralopithecus garhi; cf. page 63. Some early H ergaster/erectus may have retained
Oldowan tools as well.
After the Oldowan, and coincident with the arrival of Homo erectus, the Ache-
ulean6 tool kit, with more advanced and consistently shaped hand-axes, also shown
in Figure 10.1, became widespread instead. The significance of this change is,
however, controversial (McPherron, 2000). Aiello (1998) attributes it to the same
cognitive breakthrough that he postulates as the first step in the evolution of lan-
guage, whereas Wynn (2002) proposes a different cognitive breakthrough related
to symmetry and the ability to impose a preconceived shape on a lump of rock.
For another million years, throughout the lifespan of Homo erectus and possi-
bly a bit beyond,7 the Acheulean tools underwent little change. Klein (2000) states
that [l]ater Acheulean bifaces tend to be more extensively flaked and more care-
fully shaped... (2000, p. 23), and Wynn (2002) finds more complex symmetries
in late Acheulean tools, but the basic design remained unchanged. Even more re-
markable, the rate of technological diffusion was so slow that Oldowan tools were
still used in Europe as late as less than a million years ago, even though they had
been obsolete in Africa for almost a million years by then (Roebroeks, 2001).
The Mousterian tools that are usually associated with Neanderthals (Churchill
& Smith, 2000) were likewise fairly uniform in time, from half a million years
ago onwards, though some technological progress has been observed through time
6
Sometimes spelled Acheulian.
7
There is not a simple one-to-one correspondence between species and stone-tool industries (Davidson,
2003).
Why did language evolve? 201
Figure 10.1. Examples of tools from two early cultures. Left: Oldowan, commonly asso-
ciated with habilines. Right: Acheulean, commonly associated with Homo erectus.
at Neanderthal sites that were occupied during many millennia (Simek & Smith,
1997; Otte et al., 1998), as well as adoption of some inventions by late Nean-
derthals (Churchill & Smith, 2000), presumed to be copied from Homo sapiens
(Hublin et al., 1996), though Wynn & Coolidge (2004) argue for emulation rather
than copying, and d Errico et al. (2003) for independent invention.
And then Homo sapiens came along, and with us a clear acceleration of the
pace of technological and cultural innovation, an acceleration that is still with us
today. Here we have the main role of tools in the debate about language evolution
the sudden increase in creativity is interpreted by many, e.g. Mellars (1998),
Diamond (1991), and Donald (1997), as evidence that we had suddenly acquired
language, or at least speech (Corballis, 2002), though a large number of other
hypotheses have also been proposed (Gabora, 2003; Carruthers, 2002b). However,
as discussed in Section 9.4.1, the suddenness is largely an illusion. There was
no sudden revolution, and thus no need for a sudden cognitive leap (as in sudden
language acquisition) to explain the revolution (d Errico et al., 2003).
Ambrose (2001), citing earlier work by among others Greenfield (1991), dis-
cusses another possible role for tool making in the origins of language. The mak-
202 Origins of language
ing of composite tools is a sequential and combinatorial activity but combining
multiple elements into a structured sequence is characteristic also of language. In
this model, tool making coevolves with syntactical language, but one may also
consider the possibility that composite tool making evolved first, and provided
mental tools that were perfect exaptations for language (Wildgen, 2004).
10.3 Sexual selection
The core of natural selection is reproductive success no matter how successful
you are by other measures, if you do not reproduce you re an evolutionary failure.
Sexual selection, the selection of certain features because they directly influence
the mating success of their bearers, therefore plays a prominent role in evolution-
ary theory (Darwin, 1871), accounting for innumerable features from peacock tails
to birdsong to horns (Emlen, 2001). If one observes (or participates in) the mating
rituals of Homo sapiens today, it is obvious that language plays a non-negligible
role. The possibility that this may have been true also for early hominids is consid-
ered by many authors, e.g. Cziko (1995) and Wildgen (2004). In this scenario, the
selective advantage that drove language evolution may simply have been that the
better speakers were preferred as mates, and so got more offspring (Miller, 1999,
cited in Dunbar (2003b)). A variation on the same theme is the hypothesis of sex-
ual conflict as a driving force (Aiello, 1998), as is the observation that verbal skills
can be translated into political power, which in turn enhances reproductive success
(Pinker & Bloom, 1990) as Henry Kissinger reputedly expressed it: Power is
the strongest aphrodisiac . This political hypothesis is further discussed on page
211 below. Another related idea is that human vocal capabilities, and thus speech
capacity, may have been shaped by selection for the ability to produce pleasant,
modulated, musical sexy sounds (Darwin, 1871).
But it is not sufficient that it is plausible that the fitness of language is based
on sexual selection we also need to explain why chimps and other apes did
not evolve language if it s so great for your sex life. Human sex life is certainly
very complex, with our officially monogamous but actually semi-polygamous sys-
tem8 (Diamond, 1991), with multiple mating strategies available for both men and
women (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), with the strategies at least partially having
a biological basis, under hormonal control (Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). Such
a complex system would enhance the adaptive value of language. But it is not
obvious that the other apes have simpler mating systems:
Gibbons (1998b) were long thought to have a purely monogamous system, sim-
ilar to the official human one, but have turned out to have an actual system very
8
Genetic screening of human infants, done on more-or-less random samples for other reasons than
to determine paternity, regularly turn up on the order of several % children, even within superficially
monogamous families, who were not fathered by the official father (Salter, 1996; Marlowe, 2000).
Why did language evolve? 203
close to the actual human one instead (Brockelman et al., 1998; Gibbons, 1998b;
Fuentes, 2000).
Gorillas were likewise believed to have a fairly simple system, based on the
physical dominance of a single large male, who monopolized a harem of females.
But also in this case, careful observations have shown that the actual system is
more complex, with illicit matings with other males than the harem owner very
common, at least in some gorilla populations (Robbins, 1999), though Parnell
(2002) finds evidence of a more nearly pure harem system elsewhere.
Bonobos are probably the most sexually active of all the apes, including us, and
use sex for a multitude of purposes apart from reproduction sex for friendship,
reconciliation, or even pure recreation, is ubiquitous, in all conceivable combi-
nations of gender and number (Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994; Hohmann &
Fruth, 2000). They are also famous for having the same taste as humans in sexual
positions, with the missionary position and other face-to-face positions being the
most common, unlike most other mammals, including the other apes, where the
male enters the female from behind.
Common chimpanzees may have the most complex system of all, with both
males and females choosing between several different mating strategies (Goodall,
1971; de Waal, 1998; Gagneux et al., 1999b). A female chimp may some of the
time engage in promiscuous mating within the group, at other times seek out part-
ners in other groups for a quick discreet mating in the forest, or form temporary
monogamous relationships with a preferred male. Males may either try for politi-
cal power in the group, thereby gaining preferred access to females, or try to mate
on the sly with willing females, either in his own group or from another.
Empirical data on the prevalence and success of different strategies are not read-
ily obtained, and the data on patterns of paternity within chimpanzee communities
are contradictory (Vigilant et al., 2001).
Orangutans are solitary and arboreal, and difficult to study in the wild. Until
recently, little was known of their sex life. Nadler (1977) describes orangutan
sex in captivity, but the context is quite unnatural, and unlikely to be informative.
According to Schwartz (1987), they are mainly monogamous, but more recent
studies contradict this. To begin with, their considerable sexual dimorphism argues
against monogamy (see page 204 below), as does their territorial structure, with
large male territories each containing several smaller female territories (Fuentes,
2000). According to Singleton & van Schaik (2002) the orangutan system is quite
complex, with different males adopting different strategies. Dominant males are
able to semi-monopolize a group of females, apparently with the consent (and
sometimes active cooperation) of the females, but other males roam the forest and
may either attempt to force matings, or find willing females when the dominant
male is absent. Homosexual behavior between males has also been observed (Fox,
2001).
204 Origins of language
There is no strong reason to believe that language is more advantageous in the
human mating system than in any of the others. Particularly the gibbon system is
quite similar to ours, including similar levels of paternal care, something which the
other apes are not known to engage in (Ross & MacLarnon, 2000).9 Furthermore,
there is some evidence that the mating system of humans has changed during the
past few million years.10
One fossilizable mating-system indicator is male-female dimorphism, reviewed
in Plavcan (2001) in monogamous species, males and females are very simi-
lar, whereas in polygynous species males are commonly larger and more robust.
Gorillas, with their enormous and fearsome males and comparatively tiny females,
have a typical polygynous system, whereas gibbon males and females, with their
quasi-monogamous system, are hard to tell apart. Humans and chimps have simi-
lar levels of dimorphism, which might have been interpreted as a sign of continuity
in mating systems since the last common ancestor but some australopithecines
are commonly believed to have had a male/female size ratio comparable to gorillas
(Silverman et al., 2001; Ward et al., 2001), hinting at a strongly polygynous sys-
tem. Reno et al. (2003), however, contest the earlier dimorphism studies, arguing
that the dimorphism of Australopithecus is not significantly different from that of
modern humans.
In other primates, the canines are commonly used for intraspecific displays and
conflicts between males, and unsurprisingly males of polygynous species typically
have very large canines. In humans, canines are not used for this purpose, and are
correspondingly modest in both sexes but it is intriguing and puzzling to note
that this trend towards smaller and non-dimorphic canines was begun among the
australopithecines, where the opposite trend would naïvely be expected if they
really were highly bodysize-dimorphic (Plavcan, 2001). Their canine size makes
more sense in the context of the results of Reno et al. (2003) mentioned above.
From Homo ergaster onwards, at least, there is consensus on a human-like mod-
est degree of sexual dimorphism (Wrangham et al., 1999; Plavcan, 2001), which
might be taken as a sign that the human mating system had been the same since
then. But Dupanloup et al. (2003) present genetic results that can be interpreted
as evidence that the human mating system was mainly polygynous in the very re-
cent past, within Homo sapiens. The issue of prehistorical human mating systems
remains open.
There is one aspect of the human mating system that is novel among apes, and
that Deacon (1997) considers to be of prime importance for the origin of language,
and that is the fact that we have a more-or-less monogamous system while living
many pairs together in larger social groups. This is unique among apes, if not
9
More subtle forms of paternal care have, however, recently been observed among baboons (Sherman
& Neff, 2003), and cannot be excluded among apes.
10
Such changes are unremarkable. Mating systems are not evolutionarily stable, and may differ even
in very closely related species, like the baboons studied by Bergman & Beehner (2004).
Why did language evolve? 205
in the rest of the animal world lots of birds, for example, form monogamous
pairs within larger groups and gibbon pairs do live within earshot of each other,
even if they do not really form groups. Deacon connects this aspect of the mating
system with paternal provisioning and male cooperative hunting, arguing for the
necessity of an efficient social communication system to prevent cheating.
Other novelties in the human mating system include concealed ovulation and
the fact that females are sexually receptive and active also when fertilization is
not possible (Rodriguez-Girones & Enquist, 2001), unlike e.g., chimps, where a
female clearly advertises her fertile periods and neither sex cares about sex when
the female isn t fertile. This adds a layer of tactical complexity for humans, but
hardly enough to make our system obviously more complex than those of the other
apes.
But even if language didn t evolve because it is directly useful in the mating
game, sexual selection has the odd property that features can be selected for even
though they are disadvantageous by any objective criterion, if they happen to at-
tract the opposite sex. The tail of a peacock male is of absolutely no practical use,
and is actually detrimental to his survival but since peacock females prefer to
mate with males with large tails, a large-tailed male will have higher reproductive
success, despite dying young himself when his large tail makes him too slow to
escape a predator. Why a certain feature attracts females may well start out com-
pletely at random if both the feature in males and the preference in females are
inheritable, runaway sexual selection can result.
It is also common for mate preferences to display a bandwagon effect a mate
whom others have found attractive is commonly regarded as more desirable, re-
gardless of objective characteristics. This has been shown in experiments, mostly
with birds,11 e.g. White & Galef (2000), where females are given the choice of
several males, and regularly choose the one they have seen others choose. This
tactic makes evolutionary sense, as a male whom others find attractive will pre-
sumably sire sons whom others find attractive, giving you many grandchildren,
but can easily lead to accidental runaway selection of features that aren t superior
in any sense but simply belonged to a male who got lucky.
Quite a few features in humans may well have a similar origin in runaway sex-
ual selection, notably the ones that we find attractive in the opposite sex. For
example, there is no obvious functional reason why human females should have
breasts several times larger than the breasts of chimp females chimps manage
to produce just as much milk. The evolution of large breasts in humans may in-
stead be adequately explained by the human (but not chimp) male reaction to big
breasts.12 The male attraction to breasts may be interpreted as males looking for
11
Groupies may be interpreted as human examples of the same phenomenon.
12
In the interest of gender equality, it may be noted that the male penis has been enlarged during the
course of human evolution about as much as the female breast. It would be imprudent to speculate
about possible interpretations though Gallup et al. (2003) present some empirical results.
206 Origins of language
signs of health and fertility in females (Manning et al., 1997), but may as well sim-
ply be a case of accidental sexual selection. Darwin s (1871) notion of selection
for a sexy voice, mentioned above, may be considered in this context.
It is conceivable that language was sexually selected in this random fashion
(Okanoya, 2002), but the obvious utility of language for various purposes, both
sexual and non-sexual, points towards an adaptive explanation instead sexually
selected features are commonly either useless or harmful.
10.4 Child care and teaching
Primate babies in general mature slowly, and need parental care for an extended
period, often several years. During these years, the juvenile primates not only grow
up physically, but also learn about their environment. Behaviors that have to be
learnt include practical issues like food gathering, but the main thrust is towards
learning to function in their social environment (Joffe, 1997).
This extended childhood period has been carried to an extreme in Homo sapi-
ens, as reviewed by Leigh (2001), with humans taking fifteen years or more to
reach physical maturity, and sometimes even longer to become socially adult. At
the same time, human infants are born immature and helpless compared to other
primate babies, and require intensive parental care during the first years, severely
restricting the caregiver s activities.
The gestation time in humans is normal for a mammal of our size, follow-
ing closely the multivariate allometric relation calculated by Sacher & Staffeldt
(1974). But the factor most affecting gestation time is brain size at birth Sacher
& Staffeldt (1974) even argue that brain growth rate is the principal limiting factor
and, as noted on page 92, human brains continue growing rapidly after birth
as well, unlike most other mammals. It is commonly argued that we are system-
atically born premature, but comparative data does not support this (Deacon, priv.
comm.). The only way to get our gestation time to look unusual is to plot it against
adult brain weight but this is hardly relevant, as adult brain size is largely the
product of postnatal growth in humans.
In other words, human babies are much like other ape babies at birth but
unlike other ape babies, the brain has a lot of growing left to do, which may ex-
plain its immature state at birth. In principle, we could deviate from the normal
allometric relation and prolong our gestation time until our abnormally long period
of brain growth is done in utero,13 but given the rate of brain (and head) growth
of the human fetus, after nine months the baby s head size reaches the diameter
of the birth canal through the pelvis, and it had better get out before it s too late.
13
With the caveat that oxygen delivery constraints may also set a limit.
Why did language evolve? 207
Increasing the diameter of the birth canal is not an option, since a wider pelvis
would lead to inefficient bipedal running (Byrne, 2000).
An oddity in human development is the slow growth during childhood, even
slower than the prolonged juvenile period would warrant, followed by a rapid ado-
lescent growth spurt. This pattern, with a long childhood and then a sudden tran-
sition from child to adult, may be unique to humans (Bogin, 1997; Bogin, 1999).
There is little and conflicting evidence to indicate when the prolongation of
childhood took place during human evolution. We have no reason to believe that
australopithecines differed from other apes in this regard, but early Homo may
be different. The KNM-WT 15000 skeleton of a pre-teen boy may be a key fossil
here. Its interpretation is difficult, but Clegg & Aiello (1999) and Smith (2004) find
its growth pattern consistent with the modern human range of variation, though
faster growth remains a tenable hypothesis as well, and Zihlman et al. (2004) find a
close match with chimpanzee growth rates instead. Reaney (2001) and Dean et al.
(2001) report that indications of prolonged growth are first found in Neanderthals,
and are absent in Homo erectus and earlier fossils. This is supported by the erectus
baby found at Mojokerto, Indonesia, which had nearly an adult-sized brain already
at a very tender age (Coqueugniot et al., 2004), unlike the typical human pattern,
discussed on page 92, where the fetal period of rapid growth of the brain, which
stops soon after birth in most primates, is prolonged for several years into early
childhood.
The presence of a human growth pattern in Neanderthals would indicate that
the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals most likely also had
prolonged growth, something which is consistent with Bermudez de Castro (2002),
who reports that Homo antecessor14 had the modern human pattern of growth,
800,000 years ago, but this is apparently contradicted by Ramirez Rozzi & Bermu-
dez de Castro (2004), a more recent paper sharing one author with Bermudez de
Castro (2002), according to which both H antecessor and Neanderthals grew more
rapidly than H sapiens. There is obviously little consensus on this issue.
The extended juvenile period in humans, as in other primates, is largely spent on
getting an education. But human societies, even hunter-gatherer tribes, are much
more complex than ape societies (see Section 10.5 below), and so presumably re-
quire more time to learn. Active teaching of children, by parents and others, is
ubiquitous among humans, across all human cultures studied (Tomasello, 1999b).
Among apes, there are many anecdotal reports of deliberate teaching (King, 1996;
Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994; Byrne, 2000), but no solid experimental ev-
idence (Tomasello, 2000c) and only one systematic study in the wild that I am
aware of (Boesch, 1991, cited in Boesch (2003)). According to Premack (2004),
teaching is strictly human (p. 318).
Teaching is a process that would obviously benefit from having a language, and
King (1996) proposes this as a driving force behind language evolution. This is a
14
Very likely a Neanderthal ancestor, and claimed to be a modern-human ancestor as well.
208 Origins of language
somewhat plausible suggestion, but it should be seen in the wider context of our
social complexity, as discussed below. Furthermore, since there is little evidence
that other apes engage in teaching, we should take care to avoid the teleology pit-
fall discussed on page 194 above it cannot be postulated that language evolved
so that we could start teaching our kids. Instead, a selection scenario must pos-
tulate that teaching became important first, creating a selection pressure for better
communication which eventually lead to language.
10.5 Social relations in groups and tribes
Humans are social animals,15 as are chimps and gorillas and most other primates,
living in groups with complex social relationships; O Neil (2001) provides a brief
overview of primate social structures, and Kappeler & van Schaik (2002) discuss
their evolution. Krause & Ruxton (2002) provide a general overview of the biology
of group life.
But humans differ from the other apes in that human social groups are much
larger and more complex than chimp or gorilla groups, with correspondingly heav-
ier demands on our ability to handle social relationships. Whiten (2000) also ar-
gues that we [humans] are more deeply social than any other species on earth in
our cognitive makeup. (p. 477, emphasis in original). These increased social de-
mands are very likely the main cause of our increased brain size and intelligence,
according to the hypothesis of Machiavellian intelligence (see p 97).
Group size in animals is affected by many different factors:
Predation
On one hand, there is safety in numbers, both for mutual defense against preda-
tors, and simply because when a predator attacks a large group, the probability of
any given animal being eaten is small. On the other hand, large groups are con-
spicuous and may well attract more predators than a small discreet group. The
optimal group size depends on predator characteristics. In the case of hominoids,
the group defense argument appears most pertinent, favoring large groups (Aiello,
1998; Dunbar, 1996; Lewin, 1993). Some data exist indicating that primates sub-
ject to heavy predator pressure live in larger and more cohesive groups on average
(Heesy, 2000; Domínguez Rodrigo, 2002), and the same group may behave more
or less cohesively depending on local risk level (Bergman & Beehner, 2004). Stan-
ford (2002b) presents data indicating that both attack probability and defensive
success increases with group size, as expected, but that the net effect appears to
15
A single example of a non-social human tribe, the Ik, is reported in the anthropological literature
(Turnbull, 1978). However, the Ik are described as being able to communicate with visiting anthropol-
ogists, so presumably they had language, as well as some notion of human contact, so one may wonder
how complete their supposed non-sociality was.
Why did language evolve? 209
be that groups subject to heavy predation are smaller, contra Heesy (2000). Data
from Zuberbühler & Jenny (2002) further complicate the issue, as they conclude
from their study of leopard hunting that predation rate is positively correlated with
group size, body size, and number of defenders. It is worth pondering cause and
effect here, as the direction is far from obvious does a monkey species form
large groups as a defense against being the leopards favorite dish, or do their
large groups attract a disproportionate number of leopards?
Inter-group competition
Competition between groups may be an important factor affecting optimal group
size (Isbell & Young, 1996; Zemel & Lubin, 1995). In many social animals,
including both humans (Malmberg, 1980) and some other apes (Williams et al.,
2004), groups maintain territories and defend them against other groups of con-
specifics. Large groups have obvious advantages in such conflicts, which may
well translate into more territory per member in larger groups, again favoring large
groups for our ancestors; cf. Williams et al. (2004), who present data on the rela-
tion between group size, territory size, and food availability, among chimpanzees.
Intra-group competition for resources
In a group, the members are close together during feeding, and are likely to be each
other s worst competitors for food and other resources, decreasing food availability
particularly for low-status members of large groups, as well as requiring increased
traveling for the whole group in order to gather enough food for all (Koenig, 2002).
At an extreme, a very large group may strain the carrying capacity of the local en-
vironment (Caporael, 1996). On the other hand, if food occurs in rare but rich
patches (e.g. fruit trees in the jungle, or large carcasses to scavenge on the sa-
vannah), the larger number of food seekers in a large group increases the chance
of finding a food patch in which everybody can feed well (Zemel & Lubin, 1995;
Lewin, 1993), and the decreased predation risk in a group can increase the time
spent actually looking for food rather than looking for enemies.
Beauchamp (1998) reviews the empirical data available on the relation between
group size and food intake in birds, with the conclusion that large groups are gen-
erally favored, but that it depends on the type of food as well as other factors.
Chimpanzee group size (which is quite variable in the wild) is to a considerable
extent affected by local food availability (Matsumoto-Oda & Hosaka, 1998).
Mating opportunities
In a large group, more potential mates of the opposite sex will be available but
more competitors of your own sex as well. The net effect will be strongly depen-
dent on your status in the group. Given the generally larger variance in reproduc-
tive success for males than for females, particularly in non-monogamous species,
210 Origins of language
the effects of competition for mates can be expected to be more pronounced for
males than for females. It is indeed not rare among mammals for groups to con-
tain more females than males, with the balance of the males living alone. Whether
small or large groups were advantageous for the sex life of our ancestors depends
largely on the outcome of the intra-group politics discussed in the next point below.
Another mating-related aspect of group size concerns defense against sexual
predation. In some primate species, females form groups that may be motivated
by defense either against male sexual coercion (rape) or infanticide (Treves, 1998).
More generally, it may be worth remembering that males and females can have
very different motives for joining a group, and different optimal group size. Ac-
cording to Kappeler (1997), a common pattern is for females to form groups based
on ecological factors, and males to join groups in order to gain access to females.
Intra-group aggression and politics
Given the fierce competition for food and mates in large groups, conflicts between
group members are likely to become more common the larger the group but
open aggression is costly, both in time and energy spent, and in risk for injuries and
death. All parties would gain if all conflicts could be resolved peacefully. How-
ever, if all other group members retreat from aggression, a single aggressor can
invade and dominate the group, to the detriment of everybody else. Even though
all individuals would gain by peace, in a peaceful group each individual can gain
by aggression this paradox is related to the well-known Prisoner s dilemma
game (Koeslag, 1997). This dilemma has been the subject of considerable research
for some years, seeking the roots of the cooperative and altruistic behavior that we
do observe in many groups, and seeking to explain the comparative rarity of open
aggression, despite its apparent benefits to the aggressor.
The solution to the dilemma lies in the evolution of social intelligence, starting
with the recognition of other individuals, remembering past interactions with each
individual, and differentiation of behavior towards other individuals depending on
their past behavior. But in a large group, this taxes the brain power of most ani-
mals, limiting either the group size or the complexity of the social system (Dunbar,
1993).
A static status hierarchy is a common solution with limited cognitive demands
but the complexity rises fast if the status hierarchy isn t static, and if status
relations aren t transitive. And if you re not at the top, a static hierarchy isn t to
your advantage, so it pays to keep track of the actual power of all those around
you, and figure out the right moment for a bid for higher status but this raises
the cognitive stakes again.
What really leads to a cognitive arms race is when the simple hierarchy based
on one-on-one dominance relationships is abandoned, and the possibility of status
based on friendships and coalitions and negotiations is considered. In this case,
you have to keep track of not only your own position in the hierarchy, but also
Why did language evolve? 211
the social networks of everybody in the group who is friendly with whom, who
might consider an alliance with whom, and so on. You must be able to solve social
equations like what happens if you attack individual A, when B, C, and D are also
present B might side with you, since you did him a good turn last week, but that
might cause C and D to gang up on him, in which case ...
The possibilities are endless, and grow exponentially with increasing group
size. In the simplest case, social networks are based on blood relationships, so
that kin form permanent alliances. This is fairly common among e.g., baboons
(Strum, 1989) and various other mammals. Kin networks are permanent, making
them easy to keep track of, limiting the cognitive demands, but also limiting the
political possibilities. DNA testing on chimpanzees has shown that their politics
is not limited in this way coalitions of non-relatives are common (Goldberg
& Wrangham, 1997; Mitani et al., 2000). They are not totally unknown among
baboons either (Byrne, 2000), though less common.
Here we have the basis for the hypothesis of Machiavellian intelligence men-
tioned earlier. Considering that both humans and chimps spend a major fraction of
their time and cognitive abilities pondering intra-group relations, and considering
that humans do it in much larger and more complex groups than chimpanzees, the
hypothesis appears highly plausible we hardly need such an enormous brain
to outwit Nature, but we might well need it to outwit our fellow humans (Pinker,
1994), in order to win the game that we might call social chess (Andrews, 2001).
In the context of our early ancestors, it would appear that larger groups were
desirable for several reasons, notably predator and territorial defense connected
with the changed diet and more open habitat, that our ancestors switched to at
about the same time as our brains started growing.
But a system of highly complex intra-group political machinations had evol-
ved already before our common ancestor with the chimpanzees, as both we and
the chimps are living with such systems (de Waal, 1998), which would limit the
maximum group size to something an early ape could handle mentally. A typical
chimpanzee community consists of a few dozen individuals, with the largest ever
recorded having 117 members, including infants (Mitani & Watts, 1999), whereas
already the average human hunter-gatherer community is larger than the chim-
panzee maximum, and as we all know there are humans who have managed to
rise to the political top in communities that are orders of magnitude larger. Chim-
panzees can apparently keep track of and be competent participants in the politics
in a group with a dozens of members but they would likely be lost and confused
if they formed a typical human-sized tribe (Dunbar, 1996).
If other selective pressures forced proto-humans into larger groups than they
were used to, and they already had chimp-style politics, there would be very strong
selective pressure towards improved socio-political capacity.16 That humans are
16
As Dunbar (2003a) notes, the direction of causation has to be from group size to cognition, not the
other way round.
212 Origins of language
highly political creatures was noted already by Aristotle: Now, that man is more
of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animal is evident. (Aris-
totle: Politics 1.2, quoted in Everson (1994a, p. 7))
This political argument strongly suggests a socio-political hypothesis for the
evolution of language because politics, also in the ape version, is very much
about communication. The Aristotle quote above continues: Nature, as we often
say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech.
Agreements, formation of alliances, trading of favors, coalition building, all
aspects of politics place heavy demands on the communication between the parties
involved. A better communicator is a better politician, and a better politician can
gain higher status in the group, and reap the associated reproductive benefits for
his communicator genes and memes and spread them in the tribe. Dessalles
(2000; 2003a; 2003b; 2004) discusses this further, also invoking a direct role for
speech in gaining status. In the scenario of Dessalles, talking individuals engage
in a competitive display to advertise their informational abilities. (2004, p. 1).
People are valued as political coalition partners in direct proportion to the amount
of valuable, relevant, and novel information that they can present.
Bickerton (2003) objects to the political hypothesis, with the counterargument
that (proto-)language must have started with a tiny vocabulary, insufficient to do
any social manipulation. But chimpanzees manage a fair bit of social manipulation
with even less language, which removes most of the force from his argument.
There is little evidence in the archeological record concerning prehistoric group
size, not until very recent times in Homo sapiens (Wynn, 2002) but we already
know from modern data that Homo sapiens lives in very large groups so it is
very difficult to tell when the transition from chimp-sized to human-sized groups
took place. The hypothesis of Machiavellian intelligence would predict that group
size growth caused brain size growth, in which case it can be inferred from fossil
skulls that group size increased gradually during the past 2 million years, with a
couple of growth spurts (Dunbar, 2003a); cf. Figure 5.5. But independent confir-
mation is lacking, and Jeffares (2002) cautions against drawing far-reaching be-
havioral conclusions from brain-size data. Inferences about cognition are even
more problematic drawing conclusions like those of Dunbar (2003a), concern-
ing levels of intentionality in fossil humans, is imprudent.
Dunbar (1993; 1996) adds another twist to the socio-political hypothesis. So-
cial and political relations are based on friendship, and friendship requires main-
tenance in order to become and remain friends with people, you have to spend
time bonding with them. Among monkeys and apes, this bonding largely takes
the form of mutual grooming, reviewed in Schino (2001) but grooming takes
time (Byrne, 2000), and apes commonly spend a substantial fraction of their time
grooming each other, time during which they cannot pursue either food or sex.
The time needed for grooming is essentially constant per individual groomed, so
the total time an ape spends grooming would grow linearly with group size. Al-
Why did language evolve? 213
ready for the small groups of apes, grooming is eating up significant amounts of
time if that time is extrapolated to common human group sizes, the time re-
quired is around twelve hours per day, most of our waking hours, leaving precious
little time for other activities. But not spending the time required for social main-
tenance leads to instability in the group. It follows that grooming is untenable as
social lubricant in complex groups much larger than those of chimpanzees.
In order to maintain friendships in very large groups, a more time-effective
method is needed. Dunbar (1993; 1996) proposes that language evolved for this
purpose, as a tool for verbal grooming . He notes that a large fraction of all human
speech consists of friendly gossip, which serves both to bond those who gossip to-
gether, and to exchange valuable social information about others. In other words,
gossip fulfills the function of grooming, with an information bonus added. Fur-
thermore, gossip is much more time-effective than grooming, both because other
chores can be done in parallel, and because it doesn t have to be performed one-
on-one like grooming a group of ten people can gossip together simultaneously,
and get bonded in a small fraction of the time it would take them all to groom each
other in all pair combinations. As we all know from experience, it is perfectly pos-
sible for a human to keep up with the gossip in a fair-sized group, without having
to spend twelve hours a day at it. One might, however, wonder why a grooming
tool would need to be such an efficient information transfer system as Bick-
erton (2003) puts it, a similar result could have been achieved simply by using
pleasant but meaningless noises. (p. 79). Additional selective pressures, apart
from grooming, would appear to be needed to make language anything like what
it is today.
There is a fair correlation, as expected under Dunbar s hypothesis or for that
matter under the general socio-political hypothesis, between neocortex size and
both group size (Dunbar, 1996) and social network size within groups (Kudo &
Dunbar, 2001).
Further support for the social hypothesis comes from the various experiments
attempting to teach language to non-humans, reviewed in Chapter 7 above. The
only species having any kind of success in these experiments, apes, dolphins and
parrots, are highly social with complex group relations. Additionally, teaching
experiments are significantly more successful if they take place in a social setting
(Pepperberg, 2001; Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994).
Gärdenfors (2002) and Tomasello et al. (in press) argue that a key event in
the evolution of human cognition was the emergence of skills and motivations for
collaborating more deeply with our peers, putting our social intelligence to coop-
erative use, creating common visions (Gärdenfors, 2002, p. 2),17 as opposed to
the competitive contexts in which it originally evolved. Language is regarded by
Tomasello et al. (in press) as derivative of these cooperative social and cognitive
skills.
17
My translation from the Swedish skapa gemensamma visioner .
214 Origins of language
Aiello (1998) extends the socio-political hypothesis in another direction, argu-
ing not only that social complexity drove the need for language, but also that social
intelligence provided the cognitive structure for language:
There are similarities in reasoning processes or procedures between primate social
intelligence and the computational basis of language processing including both the
semantic aspects of language and syntax... (Aiello, 1998, p. 29).
It is argued that we store social events as scripts that provide the procedural basis
for syntax. We shall return to this possibility in Section 11.4.
All in all, the basic socio-political hypothesis appears highly plausible as a basis
for the selective advantage of language (Dessalles, 2000). The verbal grooming
hypothesis of Dunbar (1996) is worth considering as well.
10.6 Miscellaneous ideas
In this category, hypotheses are included that are far from the mainstream, and
have few supporters. The list below could have been much longer than it is, but
obvious crackpots have been excluded.
Children at play
Playing is proposed as the main environment of early language evolution by Fos-
ter (1991), with language not used for communicative purposes, but instead in
mimicry and random repetitive playing. Foster, however, clearly illustrates the
point of my reversed quote from page 3: we cannot leave the discussion of lan-
guage evolution to those linguists who have yet to understand the concerns of
modern evolutionary theory; she is one of those linguists, displaying serious mis-
understandings of (and a negative attitude towards) evolutionary biology.
Knight (2000) and Ragir (2001) return to the idea of childhood play as an exap-
tation for language, particularly its creative and combinatorial aspects, and support
it with a much better understanding of evolution than Foster. In Knight s version,
it appears fairly plausible that play contributed at some level to the origin of lan-
guage.
Music
Music and singing is the theme of Vaneechoutte & Skoyles (1998), according to
whom [s]ong ... underlies both the evolutionary origin of human language and
its development during early childhood. (p. 2), with the early stages analogous
to birdsong, and selected for similar reasons. On a related note, Dunbar (2003a)
suggests that vocal chorusing may have had a group bonding function in Homo
erectus.
Why did language evolve? 215
The notion that music had a role in the origin of language has a distinguished
pedigree, with both Rousseau (1781), Darwin (1871; 1872) and Jespersen (1922)
entertaining related ideas.
Some role for singing and rhythmic music in early language evolution cannot
be excluded, but the dismissal of language evolving as an adaptive communication
system is not plausible the role of music, if any, is very unlikely to be as dom-
inant as Vaneechoutte & Skoyles (1998) propose. Furthermore, music appears to
have its own neural circuits, distinct from those used for language people exist
who are completely amusical but still have normal language skills (Balter, 2001e)
whereas considerable overlap would be expected if music lay at the roots of
language, though Peretz & Hyde (2003) argue that amusia is caused not by defects
in any music-specific brain module, but by defective pitch perception.
Verhaegen (1998) also links music to language origins, but in the context of
the Aquatic Ape theory (Morgan, 1982), which does not add credibility (Langdon,
1997).
Storytelling
The central function of (proto-)language in the stories told by McNeil (1996) and
Heeschen (2001) is storytelling. This is indeed something that is ubiquitous and
important in human societies and as far as we can tell totally absent among other
species, and language is obviously vital for our narrative capacity. But storytelling
without language is difficult, so it is not immediately obvious how to avoid back-
wards causation in a scenario where storytelling provides the selective pressure
for the origin of language. Possibly mimesis, discussed on page 175, could be a
scaffold here?
Art
Art has been invoked in two opposite causative roles here. Davidson & Noble
(1993, cited in Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin (1994)) cast it in a positive causative
role, driving language evolution. Even more odd, Bowles (1998) presents an argu-
ment that inverts both the causal direction and the connection between language
and art, asking whether it was the absence of language that drove the evolution of
art. The empirical basis for this hypothesis is, however, modest, apparently lim-
ited to a single autistic child (presumably lacking language), who draws images
that resemble cave art.
Art in an indicative rather than causative role was discussed on page 168.
216 Origins of language
10.7 Why us and not the other apes?
Several of the ideas discussed above are plausible driving forces behind language
evolution. But general plausibility is not sufficient as has been pointed out re-
peatedly, a serious theory of language evolution must also account for the apparent
absence of language in the other apes. Many of the factors that might have driven
human language evolution, could equally plausibly have driven chimpanzee lan-
guage evolution except that in reality there must have been insufficient selective
pressure towards language in chimpanzees, since they didn t evolve human-level
language.
The split between the human and chimp lineages is commonly attributed to
the progressively drier climate in Africa in the relevant time frame, causing defor-
estation and the spread of savannah biotopes (Lewin, 1993; Isbell & Young, 1996).
The general idea is that chimp and gorilla ancestors stayed in the remaining forests,
retaining something close to the ancestral lifestyle, whereas human ancestors got
stuck on the newly formed savannah, or in isolated patches of forest. The oldest
hominid fossils are associated with woodland fauna (Haile-Selassie, 2001; Leakey
et al., 2001; WoldeGabriel et al., 2001; Schoeninger et al., 2003), but later ones
lived in more open terrain (Sponheimer & Lee-Thorp, 1999; Vogel, 1999b).
This new open-terrain lifestyle is the major ecological difference between our
ancestors and chimp ancestors, and it appears highly likely that whatever factors
drove language evolution in humans but not in chimps, are associated with this
lifestyle. Larger group size, likely driven both by the more intense predation pres-
sure on the savannah, and by the patchier food distribution, is an obvious factor
to consider. It is commonly found, when comparing forest-dwelling arboreal and
savannah-dwelling terrestrial relatives, that the terrestrials live in larger groups
(Lewin, 1993). Given a larger group size, the socio-political complications that
follow would generate a strong selective pressure towards improved social cogni-
tion and communication, as discussed above. The sexual aspects, increased teach-
ing needs, and the dietary shift towards more hunting and/or scavenging, would all
reinforce this trend, but it appears likely that the social pressures dominated. This
is a reasonably plausible scenario that could lead to the evolution of language in
the human lineage but not in chimps.
The ecological niche of Homo sapiens differs from chimps not only in its phys-
ical environment, but also in the way in which we exploit the environment. Our
lifestyle is fundamentally based on cognition and information, to such an extent
we have been called informavores (George Miller, cited by Pinker (2003)) and
our niche the cognitive niche (Tooby & DeVore, 1987). Language may in this
perspective be seen as part of a larger package of information-handling adaptations
to our information-based niche (Pinker, 2003). But language as a means for trans-
ferring information still leaves open the questions why inform each other? (cf.
Section 6.3) and information about what? , leading us back to the various alter-
Why did language evolve? 217
natives discussed above technological information, environmental information,
social information, or what?
10.8 Summary
Many factors have been proposed as the main selective pressure behind the origin
of language. The major ones are:
Hunting.
Pro:
- Economically important for our ancestors, at least within the genus Homo.
- New ecological niche for Homo with increased hunting.
Con:
- Other apes hunt, too why don t they talk?
- Other social carnivores do just fine without language.
Scavenging and gathering should also be considered in this context, as both
may have been important in our past. It is not clear why language would be
more useful for hunters than for gatherers.
Tool making.
Pro:
- Large-scale making of complex and durable tools major factor in our evo-
lution.
- Tool complexity increased in several stages in the archeological record.
Both early and late theories of language evolution can find a matching
tool-stage.
- Human-style tool making is a structured sequential activity much like
language. Possible coevolution or exaptation?
Con:
- Other apes make tools, too why don t they talk?
- Why would a basically solitary activity like flint knapping drive the evolution
of improved social communication?
Tool making does not appear plausible as a major factor behind language.
But structured sequences may be a useful language exaptation.
Sex.
Pro:
- Language use important for mating success in modern Homo sapiens.
- Human mating system more complex than that of many other animals
greater need for communication.
- Runaway sexual selection can drive evolution of all kinds of weird features.
Con:
- Other apes have sex, too why don t they talk?
- Mating system of chimps at least as complex as ours.
- Language too obviously useful to be the random result of runaway sexual
selection.
Sex may be involved with the origin of language but more likely indirectly,
in connection with the general sociopolitical point below.
218 Origins of language
Child care and teaching.
Pro:
- Language obviously useful for teaching.
- Explicit teaching rare or nonexistent in other primates.
- Humans have an extended childhood compared with other primates.
Con:
- Apes don t teach their kids. Teaching must be common and important
before it can drive language evolution.
May well have contributed to the evolution of language to some degree.
Social relations.
Pro:
- Social relations is the primary topic of language use today.
- Status and relations in the group is very important for individual fitness.
- Human social relations have a complex structure with a network of friend-
ships, alliances, political deal-making, and so on.
- Human social groups are very large, much larger than those of other pri-
mates with complex group politics.
- Better social communication obviously valuable in handling social relations
selective advantage for language users?
Con:
- Chimps have complex group politics, too why don t they talk?
The communication needs for social relations and group politics appear plau-
sible as the main driving force behind the evolution of language.
Further reading
de Waal, F. (1998). Chimpanzee politics (rev. ed.). Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni-
versity Press
Deacon, T. W. (1997). The symbolic species. New York: Norton
Diamond, J. (1991). The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee. London: Vintage
Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. London: Faber
and Faber
Sagan, C. & Druyan, A. (1992). Shadows of forgotten ancestors. London: Arrow
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