At the Birth of Language

Ian Tattersall

Noam Chomskys long-standing engagement with American politicsrecently described in these pages*has
tended to obscure his seminal work as a
scholar. Yet for him, academe has been
anything but a tranquil retreat from
the hurly-burly of public life. His principal (but far from exclusive) field of
linguistics was already a hotbed of controversy long before he arrived on the
scene; so much so that as early as 1866
the Linguistic Society of Paris specifically banned discussion of the origin
of language as being altogether too
disruptive for the contemplative atmosphere of a learned association. And
on assuming an assistant professorship
of linguistics at MIT in 1956, Chomsky
lost no time in throwing yet another cat
among the pigeons.
When Chomsky entered the field of
linguistics it was widely assumed that
the human mind began life as a blank
slate, upon which later experience was
written. Accordingly, language was
seen as a learned behavior, imposed
from the outside upon the infants who
acquire it. This was certainly the view of
the renowned behavioral psychologist
B. F. Skinner, and the young Chomsky
gained instant notoriety by definitively
trashing Skinners 1957 book Verbal
Behavior in a review published in the
journal Language in 1959. In place of
Skinners behaviorist ideas, Chomsky
substituted a core set of beliefs about
language that he had already begun to
articulate in his own 1957 book, Syntactic Structures.
In stark contrast to the behaviorist
view, Chomsky saw human language as
entirely unique, rather than as an extension of other forms of animal communication. And for all that humans
were notoriously linguistically diverse,
he also insisted that all languages were
variants on one single basic theme.
What is more, because all developmentally normal children rapidly and spontaneously acquire their first language
without being specifically taught to do
so (indeed, often despite parental inattention), he saw the ability to acquire
language as innate, part of the specifically human biological heritage.
Delving deeper, he also viewed most
basic aspects of syntax as innate, leaving only the peripheral details that
vary among different languages to be
learned by each developing infant. Accordingly, as Chomsky then saw it, the
differences among languages are no
more than differences in externalization. Whatever the biological element
might have been that underwrote the
propensity for language (and it was
not necessary to know exactly what
that was to recognize that it exists),
the Language Acquisition Device,
the basic human facility that allows
humans and nothing else in the living
world to possess language, imposed a

*See Kenneth Roths review of Chomskys Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan, 2016), The New York Review,
June 9, 2016.
August 18, 2016

set of constraints on language learning

that provided the backbone of a hardwired Universal Grammar.
Early formulations of Chomskys theory further saw language as consisting
both of the surface structures represented by the spoken word and of the
deep structures that reflect the underlying concepts formed in the brain.
The deeper meanings and the surface
sounds were linked by a transformational grammar that governed the conversion of the brains internal output
into the externalized sounds of speech.
Over the last half- century or so, much
of what Chomsky initially argued has

book coauthored with his colleague

Robert Berwick, a computational cognition expert at MIT. Why Only Us:
Language and Evolution is a loosely
connected collection of four essays
that will fascinate anyone interested in
the extraordinary phenomenon of language. It argues that the basic engine
that drives language syntax . . . is far
simpler than most would have thought
just a few decades ago.
According to Berwick and Chomsky, a single operation that they call
Merge (basically, the simplest form
of the process of recursion that
Chomsky used to view as the bedrock
Donna Coveney

Why Only Us:

Language and Evolution
by Robert C. Berwick
and Noam Chomsky.
MIT Press, 215 pp., $22.95

explains how spoken and signed languages contrive to map onto each other
so closely.
Berwick and Chomsky go on to suggest that the biology underwriting the
Merge operation emerged as the result
of a minor mutation in a member of
an early modern human population.
As judged from the archaeological record, this event occurred in East Africa
some 80,000 years ago, and it produced
a neural novelty that could yield structured expressions from computational
atoms to provide a rich language of
thought. Only at a later stage was the
internal language of thought . . . connected to the sensorimotor system
that makes speech possible. In human
evolution, then, the existence of language for thought preceded that of spoken language: a currently controversial
idea, albeit with a respectable pedigree
that traces back to the writings of John
Locke in the eighteenth century.

t this point, any reviewer with pretensions to objectivity is obliged to

point out that the press has greeted
this scenario with some derision. The
Economist, for one, found much to
chortle about:

Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky

become uncontroversial in linguistics.

Most significantly, only a few chimplanguage enthusiasts (whose ideas are
roundly trampled in the book under
review) would now reject the idea that,
among living creatures, the full-blown
ability to acquire and express language
is both an innate quality and a uniquely
human specialization. But many of his
detailed proposals have had deeply
polarizing effects, to the extent that a
substantial coterie of colleagues view
Chomsky and his followers with the
kind of suspicion that in other settings
is accorded to members of cults.
What is more, with the passage of
time, and in collaboration with a variety of colleagues (full disclosure: your
reviewer is marginally among them),
Chomsky himself has significantly
modified his views, both about those
features that are unique to language
and that thus have to be accounted for
in any theory of its originand about
its underlying mechanism. Since the
1990s, Chomsky and his collaborators
have developed what has come to be
known as the Minimalist Program,
which seeks to reduce the language
faculty to the simplest possible mechanism. Doing this has involved ditching
niceties like the distinction between
deep and surface structures, and concentrating instead on how the brain
itself creates the rules that govern language production.

Chomskys latest general statement of

his slimmed-down hypothesis of language now comes in an attractive short

of language) is sufficient for building

the entire hierarchical structure that
they see as required to produce human
language syntax. In their compact definition, Merge takes any two syntactic
elements and combines them into a
new, larger hierarchically structured
expression, a notion that is introduced
early in the book and is then enlarged
upon in some detail in later essays. In
the first account they give, they write:
For example, given read and books,
Merge combines these into {read,
books}, and the result is labeled via
minimal search, which locates the
features of the head of the combination, in this case, the features
of the verbal element read. This
agrees with the traditional notion
that the constituent structure for
read books is a verb phrase. This
new syntactic expression can then
enter into further computations,
capturing what we called earlier the
Basic Property of human language.
Reducing the essence of language
in this way, then, allows Berwick and
Chomsky to divide the problem of how
language evolved into three distinct
parts: first, the internal computational
system for hierarchically structured
expressions (such as read books);
second, sensory and motor systems
for speech production; and finally, the
underlying conceptual system, in other
words the complex of thought on which
language depends. Helpfully, the overall system they outline works with almost any sensory modality, and this

Why would this be of any use? No

one [other than the original possessor] had Merge. Whom did Prometheus talk to? Nobody, at least
not using Merge. . . . Rather, it let
Prometheus take simple concepts
and combine them . . . in his own
head. . . . Only later . . . did human
language emerge. . . . Many scholars find this to be somewhere between insufficient, improbable and
preposterous.
The condescending attitude reminds
one of the tired old joke about Dolly
Pentreath, the last native speaker of
Cornish, who died in 1777: Nobody
knows who she spoke it to.
Still, if we are prepared to put the
issue in a larger context, there is plenty
in Berwick and Chomskys argument
that deserves close consideration, and
that fits very well with what we know
about the circumstances in which language is likely to have arisen. Today,
opinion on the matter of language origins is still deeply divided. On the one
hand, there are those who feel that language is so complex, and so deeply ingrained in the human condition, that it
must have evolved slowly over immense
periods of time. Indeed, some believe
that its roots go all the way back to
Homo habilis, a tiny-brained hominid
that lived in Africa not far short of two
million years ago. On the other, there
are those like Berwick and Chomsky
who believe that humans acquired
language quite recently, in an abrupt
event. Nobody is in the middle on this
one, except to the extent that different
extinct hominid species are seen as the
inaugurators of languages slow evolutionary trajectory.
That this deep dichotomy of viewpoint has been able to persist (not only
among linguists, but among paleoanthropologists, archaeologists, cognitive
scientists, and others) for as long as anyone can remember is due to one simple
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has put it, language and thought are not

two independent domains of inquiry. If
that is true, perhaps the best proxies
we can seek for language in the human
archaeological record are objects or
activities that reflect the working of
symbolic human minds: minds capable
of envisioning that the world could be
otherwise than it is at this moment.

So what do we find when we look at

the material record? It is pretty clear

by now that the first stone tools were
made by anatomically primitive australopiths with small (ape-sized)
brains, big faces, and rather archaic
limb proportions. But at the same time
they appear to have been much more
flexible and generalist in their foodseeking behaviors than living apes are;

began to be made in both Africa and

Europe. This was the prepared- core
tool, in which a nucleus of good- quality
stone was elaborately shaped with numerous blows until a final strike would
detach a more- or-less finished implement, such as a scraper or a point. This
conceptual advance was made within
the tenure of a modestly large-brained
species called Homo heidelbergensis that is also associated with some
other important conceptual advances,
among them the building of the first
artificial shelters and the earliest routine domestication of fire. But significantly, in this time range there is only
one putativeand hugely arguable
symbolic artifact known: a vaguely
anthropomorphic lump of rock from
the Golan Heights that may have been
slightly modified to look more human.
Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

fact: at least until the very recent advent

of writing systems, language has left no
trace in any durable record. Whether
any early humans possessed language,
or didnt, has had to be inferred from
indirect proxy indicators. And views
have diverged greatly on the matter of
what is an acceptable proxy.
One widely used putative proxy is
the manufacture of stone tools, an activity that inaugurated the archaeological record some two and a half million
years ago, or possibly more. It is argued
that explaining to someone else how
to make a stone tool (or, in some versions, an elaborate stone tool) is such a
complicated matter that language had
to be involved in passing the tradition
along. But this seems contradicted by
an interesting experiment that some
Japanese researchers undertook several years ago. They divided up a class
of undergraduates, none of whom knew
anything about stone tools, and taught
one half to make a relatively fancy kind
of stone implement by demonstration
and elaborate verbal explanation. The
other half they taught by visual demonstration alone. And they discovered
that there was basically no difference
in the speed or the efficiency with
which the two groups learned.
Whats moreand this was the
most amazing thing to mein both
groups there were students who never
quite got it. Making any kind of stone
tool evidently takes a lot of smarts of
some kind, but not necessarily of the
kind specific to all language-wielding
humans today. Our predecessors were
very evidently not just less intelligent
versions of ourselves, as we have so
often been tempted to suppose.
As a result, we have to look for a
durable proxy that is more closely related to language than the manufacture
of stone tools appears to be. So why
not start with the kind of languageassociated intelligence that all modern
humans have today? What we uniquely
do (or at least what we have no way of
showing any other living creatures do)
is deconstruct our internal and external worlds into vocabularies of abstract
symbols that we can then combine
and recombine in our minds, to make
statements not only about those worlds
as they are, but as they might be. We
are able to do this because pathways
in our brains allow us to make associations between the outputs of various
brain structures that are apparently not
similarly connected in the brains of our
closest relatives, the apes.
Of course, the apes are nonetheless extraordinarily intelligent creatures, who can recognize and combine
symbols in simple statements such as
take . . . red . . . ball . . . outside. But the
algorithm involved is a simple additive one, and it is ultimately limiting
because it is tough to keep track of increasing strings of symbols. In contrast,
the algorithm associated with human
language (whatever it may be) is apparently unlimited, because through the
use of simple rules a limited number of
symbols can be manipulated to form an
infinity of different statements.
Notice that the metaphor for human
cognitive function I have chosen steers
dangerously close to a description of
language. This is why Locke believed
that words stand for nothing but the
ideas in the mind of him that uses
them, and why increasing attention
is being paid by linguists to the notion
that, as the linguist Wolfram Hinzen

Primate skeletons at the Field Museum, Chicago, 1986

and certainly by the time they began

to make stone tools, they had crossed
a cognitive boundary within which the
apes are still confined. Nonetheless,
as Ive noted, the mere act of stone
tool making is no indicator of modern human-style symbolic cognition;
and intelligent as these early ancestors
clearly were, there is no reason to believe that they were even anticipating
our peculiar modern mode of thought.
The same applies to the earliest members of our genus Homo, who show up
in the fossil record a little under two
million years ago. They were taller than
the australopiths and had body proportions basically like our own, indicating
that they had become committed to the
expanding savannah environments of
Africa, far away from the protection of
the ancestral forests. Yet to begin with,
at least, they made crude stone tools just
like those the australopiths had made:
sharp flakes, bashed from one lump of
stone using another. Only later did the
new humans start regularly manufacturing stone handaxes, the first tools
made to a regular (teardrop) shape.
And after that, tools of the new kind
continued to be made in Africa (with
only minor refinement along the way)
until around 160,000 years ago. Cultural monotony was the order of the day,
and within the tenure of early Homo
there are virtually no artifacts known that
could be considered symbolic in nature.
Clever these hominids undoubtedly were
by the standards prevailing at the time;
but once again, there is no unequivocal
evidence that they were thinking as we
do, even in an anticipatory form.
Around 300,000 years ago a conceptually new type of stone implement

Certainly, symbolic reasoning was not

a routine part of the behavioral repertoire of Homo heidelbergensis.

Homo neanderthalensis, the earliest

hominid with a brain as big as ours,

emerged about 200,000 years ago; and
in a hugely extensive archaeological
record, it furnished only the most slender and sporadic evidence for symbolic
behaviors. Yet more amazingly, the
exact same was true for the very first
Homo sapiens. Anatomically modern
humans appeared in Ethiopia at about
the same time the Neanderthals made
their debut in Europe, and at first they
left a comparable material record. It is
only at about 100,000 years ago that we
begin to findagain in Africaevidence of hominid activities that were
qualitatively different from anything
that had gone before. Suddenly, Homo
sapiens was making items such as shell
beads destined for bodily decoration
which invariably make a statementas
well as explicitly symbolic objects such
as ochre plaques engraved with deliberate geometric designs that clearly
held meaning for their makers.
At about the same time complex
multistage technologies appeared
such as the fire-hardening of silcrete, a
substance found in soil that was otherwise indifferent for tool-makingthat
clearly demanded complex forward
planning. Even more importantly, from
this point on, the signal in the archaeological record, far from being one of
stability over long periods, became one
of continuous change and refinement.
Soon the era of figurative Ice Age art
had arrived in both Europe and eastern

Asia, announcing more clearly than

anything else could the arrival of the
fully fledged human sensibility.
Clearly, something revolutionary had
happened to our species, well within
the tenure of Homo sapiens as an anatomical entity. All of a sudden, humans
were manipulating information about
the world in an entirely unprecedented
way, and the signal in the archaeological record shifted from being one of
long-term stability to one of constant
change. Hard on the heels of the first
signs of significant behavioral change,
Homo sapiens had left Africa and
taken over the world (displacing all
the hominid competition in the process), settled life had begun, cities had
started to form, and by fifty years ago
we were already standing on the moon.
The clear implication is that something had abruptly changed the way in
which humans handled information.
Most likely, the biological underpinnings for this change (both neural and
vocal) were established in the events
that gave rise to our species as a (very)
distinctive anatomical entity some
200,000 years ago. But the new potential then lay fallow, until it was released
by a necessarily behavioral stimulus.
Most plausibly, that stimulus was the
spontaneous invention of language, in
an isolated African population that already, for reasons not fully understood,
possessed a language- enabled brain.
One can readily imagineat least
in principlehow a group of huntergatherer children in some dusty corner
of Africa began to attach spoken names
to objects and feelings, giving rise to a
feedback loop between language and
thought. This innovation would then
have rapidly spread through a population already biologically predisposed
to acquire it.
That is, of course, just one construction of the facts. But it accommodates
better than anything else what we know
from archaeology. And no other scenario currently available from linguistics fits the archaeological facts better
than the essentials of Berwick and
Chomskys vision. Something occurred
in human evolution, very abruptly and
very recently, that radically changed
the way in which human beings interact with the world around them. It is
extremely hard to imagine that the beings who initiated that change were not
users of language, and there is no substantive evidence that their predecessors were. So we need an explanation
for the abrupt emergence of language;
and the one Berwick and Chomsky
provide is the most plausible such explanation currently on offer.
Certainly, the details need finetuning. For example, it is more plausible in terms of evolutionary process
that effective language and symbolic
thought emerged simultaneously, in a
feedback process involving an already
preadapted brain (and with the modern
vocal tract necessary for speech conveniently already in place), than that an
otherwise invisible mutation promoting an internal Merge was only later
recruited for language by the sensorimotor system. But then science is always a progress report; and just as what
we believed yesterday always looks
quaint today, what we believe today
will inevitably look hopelessly naive
tomorrow. If we keep that in mind,
what Berwick and Chomsky have to say
looks like progress; and it has the added
advantage of being a good read.
The New York Review