Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [98]
Much has been made about the possibility of Neanderthal language, that quintessential component of modern cognition. This is inferential science at best since soft brain tissue and vocal box structures do not fossilize. Inferences can be drawn from the hyoid bone that is part of the vocal box structure, as well as the shape of the basicranium, or the bottom of the skull. But the discovery of part of an apparent Neanderthal hyoid bone is inconclusive, says Tattersall: “However the hyoid argument works out, however, when you put the skull-base evidence together with what the archaeological record suggests about the capacities of the Neanderthals and their precursors, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that articulate language, as we recognize it today, is the sole province of fully modern humans.”27 As for the cranial structure, in mammals the bottom of the cranium is flat but in humans it is arched (related to how high up in the throat the larynx is located). In ancestral hominids the basicranium shows no arching in australopithecines, some in Homo erectus, and even more in archaic Homo sapiens. In Neanderthals, however, the arching largely disappears, evidence that does not bode well for theories about Neanderthal language, as Leakey concludes: “Judging by their basicrania, the Neanderthals had poorer verbal skills than other archaic sapiens that lived several hundred thousand years earlier. Basicranial flexion in Neanderthals was less advanced even than in Homo erectus.”28
Leakey then speculates, counterfactually, what would have happened had our ancestors survived: “I conjecture that if, by some freak of nature, populations of Homo habilis and Homo erectus still existed, we would see in them gradations of referential language. The gap between us and the rest of nature would therefore be closed, by our own ancestors.”29 That “freak of nature” is the counterfactual contingency that in our time line allowed us to survive while no other hominids did, and thus Leakey concludes, “Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.”30 Ian Tattersall also reasons in the counterfactual mode: “If you’d been around at any earlier stage of human evolution, with some knowledge of the past, you might have been able to predict with reasonable accuracy what might be coming up next. Homo sapiens, however, is emphatically not an organism that does what its predecessors did, only a little better; it’s something very—and potentially very dangerously—different. Something extraordinary, if totally fortuitous, happened with the birth of our species.”31 (See figure 10.3.)
In fact, if we want to get recursive about this, the very process of thinking counterfactually—that is, the ability to ask “What if?” questions—spotlights the best candidate for the trigger of the Great Leap Forward in human evolution. As Tattersall suggests: “Language is not simply the medium by which we express our ideas and experiences to each other. Rather it is fundamental to the thought process itself. It involves categorizing and naming objects and sensations in the outer and inner worlds and making associations between resulting mental symbols. It is, in effect, impossible for us to conceive of thought in the absence of language, and it is the ability to form mental symbols that is the fount of our creativity, for only once we create such symbols can we recombine them and ask such questions as ‘What if. . . . ?’”32
Had Neanderthals won and we lost, there is every reason to believe that they would still be living in a Stone Age culture of hunting, fishing, and gathering, roaming the hinterlands