This blog begins with one of the greatest mysteries on earth. When did the first human language emerge? The truth is that nobody really knows.
Until recently, the general consensus was that it began when our larynxes descended into our throats around two hundred thousand years ago. In 2019, though, a group of speech scientists threw the academic community into turmoil. Their paper found evidence that our anatomy may have evolved to support basic vocalisations much earlier than this: over twenty million years ago.
But of course, there’s a massive gulf between our ancestors’ primate grunts and the kind of complex communication in which you and I are engaging right now. So when did we evolve the ability to communicate in the way we now understand it — transmitting detailed information back and forth via a sophisticated verbal lexicon?
The best guess archaeologists have made is that all this began at some point before the Upper Palaeolithic period (around 50,000 BC). The Upper Palaeolithic is also known as ‘the Creative Explosion’, when humans began to shift from solitary hunters into forager groups, then suddenly started spawning abundant technological inventions: everything from sewn clothing to baking ovens, and from portable lamps to boats. In other words, this is when we became recognisably human.
What does language have to do with the process of becoming human? Everything.
What we know for sure is that human language is very different from the way every other species communicates. Organisms of all kinds transmit information through sounds, pheromones, movements, and even learned human sign language, but it’s unlikely even our Neanderthal cousins had what linguists call ‘compositional’ language systems. This means we are the only known species that communicates by combining and re-combining a vast buffet of words into sentences with infinite possible combinations. As well as our ‘referential’ facility to describe relationships between people, actions, and things (“I pick up the ball”), this compositional ability enables us to convey multiple kinds of information at once by shifting seamlessly between past, present, and future (“Sylvia put the ball down over there so I ran towards it, but then I realised Evan might be waiting to jump out at me, so now I’m hiding here”). If we consider that a simple word list containing only twenty-five subjects, verbs, and objects apiece has the capacity to generate fifteen thousand distinct sentences, it can’t be overemphasised how unique and miraculous this ability truly is.
That’s not all. Equally miraculous is the astounding willingness of humans to co-operate with unrelated strangers of our own type. These two evolutionary quirks are what set us apart from every other species on the planet. What’s more: those two developments are absolutely connected. What compositional language gave us was a way to resist instinctual sensations of mistrust — an instinct which, as evolutionary economist Paul Seabright points out, no other animal species has successfully defeated. Rather than activating fight or flight, we began to want to congregate with strangers.
As the Upper Palaeolithic period came to an end, we started building big spaces for congregation and developing rich rituals to help us forge social bonds. By offering a mechanism through which we could agree complicated frameworks of shared norms for mutual co-operation, compositional language was an integral part of learning to place our trust in others. In fact, some linguists have posited that the seven thousand-plus languages spoken today may even have come from one common root, originally spoken by a small population in East Africa then branching out all around the world.
Either way, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once argued, there can be no such thing as a ‘private language’; because language, by its very nature, is a social act. It may well be our greatest invention of all.
Long story short: the development of complex linguistic systems is what allowed us to live together within the increasingly large and equally complex societies we know today. This is why the word ‘conversation’ comes from the Latin past-participle conversari: “to dwell, live with, keep company with” other people. Humankind’s evolutionary ability to keep company with strangers was originally made possible through the great levelling device that is a good conversation — that mutual desire to share stories of our lives with others, and to hear their stories in return. In a time when our social world increasingly seems riven by disagreement, and when our communities (both on- and off-line) risk fragmenting irreversibly into factions of distrust, it’s never felt more urgent to re-learn the lessons of the past.
We can do this by understanding more about how conversation actually works. That’s what this blog is all about. In my next article, I’ll be continuing to pull on this thread by asking a question that’s a bit easier to answer. What is a conversation, anyway? Is there a difference between the act of conversing and engaging in other forms of discourse, like a debate or a discussion or an argument?
Credits Author: Kirsty Sedgman (Doctor of Audiences) | Editor: Anastasia Niedinger | Photography: Jason Leung
👀 New here? Here’s a guide to everything you can find on our research blog.
Column 1: Conversation, the science and myths exposed.
https://lnkd.in/eid35JKZ
Mini-series: The technology of listening.
https://lnkd.in/ej7HJ6Dt
Column 2: The meat of moderation, an unsung superpower.
https://lnkd.in/eNJVrSgw
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