How the evolution of language reflects and shapes our biology and culture

Review of How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention by Daniel Everett

This book offers an academically cutting-edge perspective on the origins and structure of human languages. If a bit turgid in places as it presents evidence and complex proofs, it is a deeply fascinating and fulfilling reading experience. I would recommend it as an ideal introduction to linguistics, including the evolution of modern human society, culture, and biological attributes.

If there is a principal argument, it is that language emerged gradually over the last 2,000,000 years from a myriad of factors and is not the result of a single genetic mutation or the development of some simple set of “organs” for language. In other words, Everett’s perspective flatly attempts to refute Chomsky’s ideas, the reigning paradigm.

Everett defines language as a “gestalt” of meaning (semantics), sounds (phonetics), grammar, phonology (sound structure), morphology (word structure), “discourse conversational organizational principles”, information, and gestures. Functioning as a whole from all of these elements, its purpose beyond survival advantage is to help build communities, culture, and society; this requires the ability to think in complex and flexible ways, including recursion (thinking about thinking), which distinguishes human capabilities from pre-programmed animal instinct. Language, Everett emphasizes, is a phenotype, or attribute combining genes and environmental factors, hence not a genotype, i.e., genes that determine culture interaction.

Simply put, Everett believes in “sign progression theory”, according to which language emerges in stages, progressing from indexes (items that physically connect to an object one wishes to represent, such as a footprint to signify an animal) to icons (a physical representation that resembles a subject, such as drawing or ideogram), culminating in symbols(arbitrary representations like words). Eventually, in order to express complex and abstract thoughts, symbols are combined into grammar. If its origins are found in animal communication (basic modes of information transmission), it relies on a synergy of biological and cultural factors.

The story starts 2 million years ago, when homo erectus proved able to populate all of Eurasia in little over 150 years. Without unprecedented collaboration as a group, Everett’s reasoning goes, erectus would never have been able to travel in sufficient numbers to survive as a community; they had to mobilize scarce resources within the restrictions of a given environment. To do so, erectus had to become sapient, that is, organize and share knowledge – articulating needs, planning expeditions, creating and improving tools, possibly even promulgating visions of what it all meant. This would indicate, Everett argues, the development of a genuine culture, complete with symbolic logic, the communication of which required some kind of language.

Everett’s proof for all of this involves how homo erectus was able to travel to remote islands by boat, the emblem of an entire culture and way of being, along with artifacts that also constituted a type of language; the manufacture of tools also required imagination, planning, and dissemination by communication.

Regarding the mysterious explosion of human creativity that appeared about 50,000 years ago, Everett argues against some kind of “catastrophic” event – a one-off, such as a brain mutation – in favor of a gradual development of culture and experience that culminated at that time. In a way, this was a new kind of synthesis of capabilities in environmental context, he believes. The essence of it was a “flexible cognition” that enabled humans to innovate and communicate in new, more complex ways. The evidence for this, Everett argues, is that many areas of the brain are involved in language yet they are also integral to related functions, i.e. none of them are an “organ” uniquely enabling language on its own; even language-hindering diseases impact other, seemingly unrelated cognitive functions; by the same token, there is no hereditary (i.e., single gene-based) disease that affects only language. To posit some instinct or gene, he concludes, is nothing but speculation without proof. Though I have not yet read Chomsky or Pinker to learn their arguments, I find this quite convincing.

On the technical side, Everett spends a lot of time on the physical and cognitive requirements for language. For the former, this covers the shape of the jaw, the larynx, etc.; for the latter, a large brain with multi-functional regions that interact. These were difficult chapters for me, but are interesting and essential. As these requirements came together, Everett argues, they mixed with the development of culture and society, which furnished the organizing capabilities that enabled humans to survive and come to dominate the planet. As always, he stresses that intelligence is coeval with the development of social and cultural complexity, that modern language emerges as a gestalt of many capabilities and environmental necessities.

This book offers a supremely rich reading experience. Like Sapolsky’s Behave, it is a masterpiece of popular science at the academic cutting edge, so dense with ideas that I will need to re-read it over the years to refresh my memory and I am sure I will see more on each re-read.

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