LITMIR.BIZ

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the past five million years new hominid species have regularly emerged, competed, co-existed, colonised the environment and succeeded or failed,’ writes palaeontologist Ian Tattersall. ‘We have only the dimmest of perceptions of how this dramatic history of innovation and interaction unfolded, but it is evident that our species is simply one more of its many terminal twigs.’

      The methods of the New Genetics have confirmed that all the human races – Negroes, Caucasians, Asians and so on – are genetically identical, thus all descendants of an entirely novel species, Homo sapiens, ourselves, who emerged it is presumed in east or south Africa in 120,000 BC before spreading out to colonise the world. But that leaves the ‘terminal twig’ of ourselves suspended in limbo, with no obvious attachment to those earlier branches of that evolutionary bush. The account of ourselves which until recently seemed so clear now seems permeated with a sense of the deeply inexplicable – whose implications we will return to after considering the second aspect of the riddle of that evolutionary trajectory: the Cromagnons with their ‘passion for art’.

      THE RIDDLE OF THE ASCENT

       Part 2: The Cultural Explosion and the Origins of Language

      ‘Homo sapiens is not simply an improved version of his ancestors, but a new concept, qualitatively distinct from them … A totally unprecedented entity has appeared on the earth. All the major intellectual attributes of modern man are tied up in some way with language.’

       Ian Tattersall, Curator, American Museum of Natural History

      The most striking feature of the arrival of modern man is its suddenness and completeness, epitomised most obviously by the beauty and originality of those artefacts he left behind: the ‘pride of lions’ portrayed in perspective on the walls of the Chauvet cave; the beads and jewellery for self-adornment in this and the ‘next’ world; drums fashioned from mammoths’ bones to celebrate, with singing and dancing, the wonders of the natural world; oil lamps, harpoons, spear-throwers. All the features in short – artistic, technical, economic and religious – that can be found in contemporary society.

      The precipitating factor in that cultural explosion must, by common consent, be tied up in some way with language. The Cromagnons had a ‘passion for art’, so an obvious starting point in searching for the qualitative difference that language might make, and which would distinguish them from their antecedents, is to ask what a painting or a sculpture of, say, a bison, is. It clearly is not a bison, nor the reflection of a bison, nor the imaginative figment of a bison – as in a dream. It is not a sculpture of a specific object, but rather a generalised image of a class of objects: it stands for, is symbolic of, bison in general. It is the idea of a bison. This ability of Cromagnon man to conceptualise things and feelings as ideas, and to express those ideas as words, introduces an entirely new dimension into the universe.

      First, language – and it is a most extraordinary thing – allows us to ‘think’, by assigning words to objects and ideas. Then it becomes possible to express a logical idea by applying grammatical rules to the arrangement of those words, and linking them together sequentially in a sentence. And more, the faculty of language allows us to take those thoughts ‘brought into existence’ by language and insert them with complete precision into the minds of others for them to share, or to disagree with. Language makes the world intelligible, by allowing man to transmit his thoughts and experiences in the form of accumulated knowledge from generation to generation – leading, perhaps inevitably, to the moment at the close of the twentieth century when he would ‘hold in his mind’s eye’ the history of the universe he inhabits. Language makes it possible to distinguish truth, the faithful reflection of reality, from falsehood, and this, as the philosopher Richard Swinburne points out, is the foundation of reason (obviously), but also of morality, for ‘it gives man the capacity to contrast the worth of one action to that of another, to choose what he believes worthwhile … and that gives us a conception of the goodness of things’. Thus humans, like all living things, are biological beings constrained by nature’s laws; nonetheless language liberates our mind from the confines of our material brain, allowing us to transcend time and space to explore the non-material world of thought, reason and emotion. So, ‘All the major intellectual attributes of modern man are tied up in some way with language,’ as Ian Tattersall argues. Where then did language come from?

      The prevailing view, till recently, held that this remarkable faculty required no specific explanation, and could be readily accommodated within the standard evolutionary rubric of the transformation of the simple to the complex. Language is explained (or ‘explained away’) as an evolved form of communication, no different in principle from the grunts or calls of other species. ‘I cannot doubt,’ observed Darwin in The Descent of Man, ‘that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voice of other animals and man’s own instinctive cries…’ So too contemporary evolutionary texts portray human language as an improved method of communication over that of our primate cousins, while emphasising the similarities in the larynx and vocal cords (which, however, are not so similar as they appear) as evidence for language’s evolutionary origin. ‘Language evolved to enable humans to exchange information,’ observes Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool.

      In the 1950s the famous linguist Noam Chomsky challenged this interpretation of language as a more sophisticated form of primate communication by drawing attention to the significance of the remarkable alacrity with which children learn to speak. Language flows so readily, a ‘babbling’ stream of feelings, thoughts and opinions filling every nook and cranny of our lives, it is easy to assume it must be simple, simple enough for children to ‘pick up’ as readily as they pick up measles. Prior to Chomsky, the standard view held that children learned to speak in the same way as blotting paper absorbs ink, by soaking up the words they heard and then reiterating them. Chomsky argued this could not be so, pointing out the skill with which very young children learn to speak lies far beyond the intellectual competency of their years, for while they must struggle to grasp the elementary principles of mathematics, they acquire language with astonishing ease. An infant starting from a situation not dissimilar to that of an adult in a room of foreigners all jabbering away incomprehensibly, nonetheless:

      ‘Within a short span of time and with almost no direct instruction will have dissected the language into its minimal separable units of sound and meaning,’ writes linguist Breyne Moskowitz. ‘He will have discovered the rules of recombining sounds into words and recombining the words into meaningful sentences. Ten linguists working full-time for a decade analysing the structure of the English language could not programme a computer with a five-year-old’s ability for language.’

      The aptitude of the young mind in mastering the staggering complexity of language presupposed, Chomsky argued, that humans must possess some form of highly specific ‘Language Acquisition Device’ hardwired into their brains that somehow ‘knows’ the meaning of words and the grammatical forms necessary to make sense of them. How, otherwise, can an infant know when its mother says, ‘Look at the cat!’ that she is referring to the furry four-legged creature, and not to its whiskers, or the milk it is drinking. Further, the ‘device’ must not just know what is being referred to, but the grammatical rules that permit the same ‘idea’ expressed in different ways to have the same meaning (‘John saw Mary’ conveys the same message as ‘Mary was seen by John’), but excluding meaningless variations. Further again, it transpires that children learn language in the same way, whether brought up in New Jersey or New Guinea, and acquire the same grammatical rules of ‘present’, ‘past’ and ‘future’ in the same sequence. This implies that the ‘device’ in turn must be sensitive to a Universal Grammar, common to all languages, which can pick up on the subtlest distinction of meaning.

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