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Darwin well understood that such mental qualities had been affected— some variously honed and accentuated, others diminished—by a pro sexual selection similar to the selective modifications brought about animal breeders in domesticated species. His comparison, which hardly been noticed by later commentators, is not as odd as it might seem: he argues in The Descent of Man that the domestication originally wild animals in human prehistory was largely “unintentional,” a process in which man “preserves during a long period the most pleasing useful individuals, without any wish to modify the breed.” Our ancestors, in other words, had no conscious plan for how species herded or worked with would look or behave in a hundred generations. A Pleistocene hunter might feed and tolerate near his camp a wild that is docile toward him and his family but fierce in confronting strangers or other animals. An early Holocene herder would keep milking submissive beasts that tended not to stray far from camp, slaughter more in dependent or troublesome stock. Selective domestication of animals by humans occurred over many thousands of generations of deciding which animals were more desirable to keep than to eat.

In a manner that Darwin calls “closely analogous,” human beings prehistory practiced selective breeding on themselves by their own mating choices—essentially, it is accurate to say, domesticating their own species. Take, for example, the evolution of language. Speech as a medium communication and practical planning would have been highly adaptive flowering as the distinctly human phenomenon. Darwin himself suggests the oldest evolved roots of human speech were expressive warning used to signal when the primate group is under threat: this capacity would improve survival and would have been enhanced by natural selection. However, sexual selection would have extended this ability of Darwin argues, to use “his voice in producing true musical cadences, is singing, as do some of the gibbon-apes at the present day”:

We may conclude from a widely-spread analogy, that this power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes,—would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph,—and would have served as a challenge to rivals. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.

Darwin is not denying the factual communicative utility of language its role in natural selection. He does, however, find its potential express emotions in courtship contexts a plausible source of part of early evolution. By suggesting the work of sexual selection on the evolution of language, Darwin is also suggesting another possibility: over above its utility for Pleistocene survival, language use became a fitness signal—a marker of health and intelligence.

Any hunter-gatherer band that could communicate within the group the whereabouts of water or of game, or could pick over the past detail and plan raiding sorties, would possess an extraordinary advantage over competing groups without language (this is one of the per sistent hypotheses about why our forebears may have exterminated the Neanderthals). But it is inadequate to analogize language only to a tool—say, bread knife or the assorted blades of a Swiss Army knife. If knives the analogy, language is better thought of as a saber with a jewel-encrusted hilt and a blade with intricate gold inlay. You are free to whittle a stick or cut bread with such a knife, but its meanings and uses extend for survival.

Consider vocabulary. Nonhuman primates have perhaps twenty distinct average of ten to twenty every day between the ages of about three to eighteen. Would survival in the Pleistocene have required and enabled the acquisition of such a stupendous vocabulary? Certainly and in fact, 98 percent of our speech even today uses only about four thousand words. I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden’s Basic English international communication made do with only 850 words; as Miller points