6.1 The Emergence and Development of Language

By the end of this section, you will be able to do the following:

  • Describe the communicative abilities of wild animals such as birds and primates.
  • Distinguish primate communication from human language.
  • Identify the biological features of early hominins that were central to the emergence of language.
  • Identify the archaeological evidence for the emergence of language.

There are some seven thousand languages spoken in the world today. Most people are proficient in at least one of them, possibly more. But people are biologically capable of mastering any of them, and have been since birth. Humans are born language ready. For a human baby, any language will do. With passive exposure to language (simply hearing it without any formal instruction), human toddlers learn the complex rules and vast vocabularies of the language spoken (or signed) around them. This astounding feat is made possible by specific biological features in the brains and bodies of human babies, features designed to help them understand and produce language. The learning of language then triggers further changes in our brains, making possible certain kinds of reasoning and thought as well as communication with others.

A toddler sitting on the grass. She holds her right hand up in the air with her thumb tucked under the rest of her fingers.
Figure 6.2 When teaching language to their children, some parents teach signs (such as those of American Sign Language) as well as spoken words for objects. The theory is that sign language and spoken language are processed in different parts of the brain. Teaching these two forms of language together may provide deeper cognitive reinforcement and greater chance of recall. This baby is making the sign for “bird.” (credit: “Bri signs ‘Bird’” by Bev Sykes/flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Drawing on biological and archaeological evidence, researchers seek to understand how, why, and when humans developed the biological features associated with language and, once language emerged, how the practice of language changed the way of life of early humans. Language became a building block for human culture of increasing complexity. Innovations such as stone tools, hunting, and using fire for heat and cooking were made possible by language. In turn, these new skills enhanced the survival of those who practiced them, increasing the likelihood that those people would live to pass on their genetic makeup to their offspring. This means that certain biological features were key to the invention of human culture and that human culture was key to the biological development of humans. We think of this as a reciprocal system of biocultural coevolution. Put another way, biology and culture developed in tandem, with language as the link between the two.

No one really knows when or how humans invented language. The problem is that language, whether spoken or gestural, leaves no direct trace in the archaeological record. Lacking direct evidence, researchers must be creative, combining various indirect forms of evidence to suggest theories about how language may have begun in humans. Based on such methods, researchers think that language may have emerged between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago. The largeness of this window of possibility is due to the indirect nature of the evidence and a great deal of controversy about which elements may have been most important in the process of language development. In this section, we look at these forms of indirect evidence, starting with communication in the animal kingdom.

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The content of this course has been taken from the free Anthropology textbook by Openstax