The Unexpected Origin of Language
We have finally figured out how language evolved.
One million years ago, in the foothills of East Africa, humans learned to create and control fire and extend their days into the dark. The magic and sanctuary of fire drew tribes together each evening and caused a radical redirection of human evolution. The wavering flames were too dim for gestures, grooming, or play, so these early people socialized using sounds.
There are many ways for living creatures to make deliberate noise. Some fish vibrate their swim bladders; crickets and katydids rub body parts together; and rattlesnakes rattle their tails. For humans and other mammals, the most common noisemaking method is the controlled modulation and vibration of exhalation called vocalization.
Vocalization first evolved to send fertility signals and warnings. When our distant ancestors started communicating beside their nightfires, they repurposed the calls and cries they made for foraging, hunting, and mating. But what they wanted to communicate at night differed from what they wanted to communicate by day. Day talk uses imperatives, commands, and warnings to convey information about immediate practical matters. It communicates things like go there, stop, mate with me, or look out! a hyena!—the human equivalent of birds cawing and wolves barking. There are few immediate practical matters around a nightly fire, so humans did something no creature had done before: In the warmth and security of their flames, they communicated about events remembered and imagined, from places and times near and far. Or, they started telling stories.
Storytelling requires more nuance than the pointing and hollering of hunting and gathering, and so, over hundreds of thousands of years, beside hundreds of millions of fires, human vocalization evolved, and the grunts and yelps turned into a complex series of sounds about subjects, normally human, acting on objects—the infinitely expressive system of communication we now call language. Language did not give us stories; stories gave us language.
From The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art.
Image: Prehistoric Art From Tassili n’Ajjer. Photo by Patrick Gruban. Sharealike License.