LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
• List the kinds of evidence scientists invoke to explain the origin of language.
• Explain how language development helped our human ancestors post-hunt more than during a hunt.
• Discuss the role of narrative in human evolution and the evolutionary importance of recursivity in narrative.
• Describe the changes in human vocal anatomy and the advantages and disadvantages of these changes.
• Discuss the usefulness of framing as a model for understanding communication in contemporary humans and in nonhuman animals.
Introduction
In Chapter 4, we looked at fully modern language quite apart from its evolution. Now, in Chapter 5, we explore the evolution of communicative systems, with a specific focus on language. And whereas previous chapters have focused almost exclusively on human communication, in this chapter, I situate our species in the midst of our relatives, both close and distant.
Most anthropologists regard evolution by natural selection as a foundational idea. In this chapter, we look at language as an evolutionary feature of humans. In the process, we explore the origins of human language, the benefits and risks to its development, and its distinguishing features that may have bolstered our development by facilitating complex social interactions and complex thought. What becomes clear as we explore these ideas is that modern human language and the modern human mind, in fact, evolved together.
Although contemporary linguistic anthropology focuses little attention on evolution per se, broader anthropological and semiotic approaches to culture and communication explore all forms of animal communication that result from evolutionary processes. Thus, I provide relevant examples of animal communication as part of our discussion here.
Communicative Systems Evolving
Language is a capacity common to all members of the species Homo sapiens. This capacity is built into all of our brains, and it reflects our evolutionary heritage, particularly the semiotic systems of our forebears, including mammals like cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) and primates (from the most primitive prosimians to monkeys, and especially apes).
Thus, although language reflects and requires a fully human brain, neuroscientists looking at primate brains, and even birds’ brains, see traces of the communicative systems that preceded full-fledged language. For example, the brains of ravens (see Figure 5.1) have evolved in ways that facilitate their ability to learn complex communication systems (Emery and Clayton 2004; Reber et al. 2016).