How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [100]
As pattern-seeking animals, humans evolved speech as one of the earliest symbolic patterns, with sounds and words representing objects and events in the physical and social environment. But no one knows exactly when language evolved. The scientific evidence is sketchy at best. Cranial endocasts of hominids as old as those of Homo habilis and even Australopithecus africanus (dating several million years old) reveal the nooks and crannies of the exterior surface of the brain. Some of these may correspond to the distinctive language centers of the modern human brain, but whether they drove language in these ancient hominids is impossible to prove. In the Kebara 2 burial site in Israel there is evidence of language in Neanderthals in the form of a nearly complete hyoid bone—a free-floating bone attached to soft tissue in the larynx that anchors throat muscles involved in speech—found next to a Neanderthal mandible.
Equally important, however, is the question, why language? Language may have evolved for strictly adaptive purposes, giving our hominid ancestors a selective advantage in dealing with the physical and especially the social environment. On the other hand, all other modern primate species are social and hierarchical, yet not one of them has developed as complex a language system as ours. Perhaps language is, in part, a spandrel—a contingent by-product of an enlarged brain evolved for dealing with symbols and different components of language developed for other reasons and later employed in language and speech. Donald Johanson summarizes this as-yet-unsolved mystery:
Language evolution is probably intimately linked to brain evolution, and since our brain has been growing and reorganizing over the past 2 million years, it seems unlikely that language suddenly arose from some radical new mutation. Human brains could have been language-competent long before spoken languages appeared. The enlarging brain of early Homo no doubt was capable of complicated cognitive coordination and calculation and as such relied on and used skills important to language. Perhaps language evolved in tandem with our enlarging brain or was a cause, rather than a consequence, of brain enlargement during the Pleistocene.
Whenever and however language evolved, from pattern-seeking to speech-making to storytelling to mythmaking, humans solved problems through language. Anthropologist Terrence Deacon goes so far as to invent a new species designation for us, Homo symbolicus, the hominid symbol user. Anthropologists studying modern hunter-gatherer societies, for example, have found that problems are often couched in the language of stories, myths, and other symbolic narratives, such as songs and poems. In his description of the Copper Eskimo, for example, anthropologist David Damas notes that “every man or woman in that group was said to have had his own compositions. Some of the subjects of the songs were man’s impotence in the universe, hunger, songs of the hunt, songs of lust, the fear of loneliness, and death.” The description is as applicable for suburban commuters in New York as it is for hunter-gatherers in Alaska.
Paleoanthropologists believe that we evolved in small hunter-gatherer (and scavenging) communities operating out of a home base and utilizing considerable cooperation and communication. The late archaeologist Glynn Isaac proffered the “home base hypothesis” from which hunting and gathering would have been conducted, with food substances brought back to a specific place where it was shared. Archaeologist Lewis Binford pushes for a “scavenging” model, where ancient hominids more likely would have taken what they could find from the remains of already hunted animals, rather than hunting themselves. Either way, anthropologist Robert Bettinger