1
Night
Through the clouds of scorching dust and ashes that Sadiman has been belching up for days, a small family treks across the grey, bleak savannah. They pay little heed to the rumbling volcano, whose glow paints the dust-filled sky an ominous orange. They have become used to it.
The man leads the way. The woman follows, a child clinging to her left hand. The girl has trouble keeping up, in part because despite her parentsâ agitation she is playing a game, trying to tread precisely in her fatherâs footsteps. Every now and then, the booming of the volcano is punctuated by pelting showers and crashing thunder, the rain turning the thin blanket of ash that covers everything into slick mud.
At times, they catch a fleeting glimpse of other creatures in the dusty half-light. Buffalo, antelopes, the occasional large predator. They ignore them; they have other worries. They walk fast, in silence, panting with exertion. When the child trips, the woman yanks her upright. âKeep moving, dammit,â she snaps, without breaking her stride. And then, soothingly, âJust for a little while longer.â
Nobody knows whether this little family made it to wherever they were going in the dust bowl Sadiman was turning their part of East Africa into. Today, only their footprints remainâfootprints that solidified in the mud and were buried under new coats of ashes and dust, only to be stumbled upon over 3.5 million years later by Andrew Hill, a paleontologist working the Tanzanian site of Laetoli. That was in 1976. What exactly was going on when the footprints were madeâ something like the scene above, or something altogether differentâwe can never be sure. But one thing is clear: it is extremely unlikely that whoever walked there could actually talk or was capable of anything even remotely like it.
They were very different from us, these wanderers. They were small and ape-like, with brains weighing less than a pound, much like those of modern chimpanzees. Most experts attribute the Laetoli footprints to creatures like Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis skeleton that had been unearthed nearby only two years before Hill made his discovery. âLucyâ herself, however, presumably lived nearly half a million years later.
Lucy and her kind walked upright. That much is certain. But although they are considered our more or less immediate ancestors, these creatures were nowhere near human. The oldest known toolsâ mere shards that were intentionally struck off larger stonesâdate back approximately 1.75 million years. That is more than a million years after Lucyâs kind disappeared from the face of the earth. Meanwhile, one of the most mysterious developments in human history took place: the unprecedented enlargement of our neocortex, which we have to thank for both our oversized heads and the exceptional faculties that make us human.
A million yearsâjust think about the scale of things here. If the distance separating us from Julius Caesar is one step on an ordinary staircase, a million years would be as high as St. Stephenâs tower in Westminster in London, which houses Big Ben. Today, women in Western Europe on average give birth for the first time when they are around thirty years old. At that rate, a million years equals 33,333 generations, whereas we are only sixty-seven generations away from Caesar, fewer than two hundred from the invention of writing and roughly three hundred from the emergence of agriculture and the founding of the earliest permanent settlements. Such a vast expanse of time is in itself good reason to deny our distant ancestors the capacity for language. One simply cannot imagine a species having such a powerful instrument at its disposal for so many generations without ever using it in any recognizable way: never accumulating and pooling knowledge, never building up anything resembling a culture, barely showing any sign of creativity. How likely is it that creatures that possessed the ability to speak would have remained unable for so long to come up with anything to say? They would literally have bored themselves to deathâin which case there would have been no âus.â
* * *
Yet here we are. So it makes good sense to ask when and why our language faculty did come into existence. For whichever way we look at things, human language remains an astonishing, even miraculous phenomenon. We experience it as our most human, most defining characteristic. It is a phenomenon that distinguishes us fundamentally from all other forms of life. We are prone to attributing virtually any human trait to a pet. Most dog owners bestow the power to think, reason and understand people on their four-legged favorites as a matter of course. And people routinely talk to dogs, even other peopleâs dogs, as if they were having a perfectly normal chat with a fellow human. But there is one difference: we never expect animals to talk back, to engage in actual conversation. Not dogs, and not even parrots. Nor do we expect them to be able to communicate in anything other than their usual way, which is why we never blame Fido for answering nothing but âwoof!â
Language is characteristically ours. It is what we areâor at least, that is how we feel. If there is any truth to that feeling, if language is indeed uniquely human, then at some point in time something must have happened that sent our forebears off on a new, essentially different trackâsomething that caused a deep rift between us and all the rest of the animal kingdom.
Does this rift really exist? Does our language faculty set us fundamentally apart from our fellow creatures? Or do humans just possess more of the same stuff other species have? These questions have been subjected to much scrutiny over the past hundred years or so, and from time to time the matter of the origins of human languages has stealthily reared its head again, in spite of the 1866 ban on the subject by the Societé de Linguistique.
Roughly, the matter of the apparent uniqueness of human language has been broached from two perspectives. The first is that of current mainstream linguistics, generative theory, developed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky in the mid-1950s. Generative linguists consider the human language faculty to be unique. These âChomsky-ansâ are opposed by a colorful coalition of ethologists, psychologists, linguists, and would-be linguists of all persuasions, who entertain altogether different notions. Most flamboyant among them are those who have left no stone unturned in their efforts to teach a wide variety of animals something resembling human language. Animals like Alex, the miracle parrot who died in 2007; Koko, the gorilla who failed miserably at online chat; and the chimpanzee Nim, flippantly nicknamed Nim Chimpsky. The âChimpskyansâ believe that there is no principled difference between man and beast, and soâgiven proper training of courseâanimals should be able to learn to use language.
To Chomsky and his colleagues, such ideas have always been anathema. Right from the outset Chomsky maintained that only humans have a language faculty. That faculty, he said, was based in a special language organ in the brain, which was there exclusively for the production and reception of language. It all sounded a bit dogmatic, conceited even. Storms of protest arose, and angry incomprehension ran rife, for there was no trace of a dedicated language organ to be found. On the contrary: as the years went by and more and more areas of the brain were identified that were involved in language processing, each and every one of them proved to serve other purposes as well.
Noam Chomsky at 84 in 2013 (Photographed by Oliver Abraham).
Had the great Chomsky really been so utterly wrong? Not really. While the concept of a language organ was in one way quite essential to him, from a different perspective it was small fry. Chomsky is a theoretician. The description of our language faculty that he has strived all his life to achieve is not a picture in a biological atlas, but an abstract model. To him, the language faculty is not a gooey clump of cells, but a system of strictly logical rules that produces the same effect as a ârealâ language faculty. Such a model has much in common with flight simulation software. It looks nothing like actual airspace, full of wind, rain and up-currents, but for the trainee pilot it replicates all the vicissitudes of actual flight in full.
Claiming that some specific, isolated corner of the brain was dedicated to language and language alone simply enabled Chomsky to put all other psychological traits aside and concentrate exclusively on the language faculty proper. That way, the enterprise that he set so much store by remained manageable. What mattered first was to construct a solid theory of how everyday words and sentences were structured. That alone would be quite an achievement. Once that framework existed, it would be possible to delve into the relationship between language and other properties of the mind, like memory, thought, and emotions. And not until then would it make sense to start thinking about how the whole thing was embodied in the world of flesh and blood.
Apart from such practical, strategic considerations, there was also a principled point to be made. Chomsky wished to stress that language is part of our biological endowment. It was not, as the prevailing wisdom had it when he set out on his quest, a purely cultural phenomenon on a par with knitting, football or playing the piano. Those are all skills that a child must acquire step by step, whereas language, Chomsky wanted to make clear, is something with which we are born. It is as much a part of our bodies as eyesight or the ability to walk. And like eyesight and walking, language is among the biological skills that are not yet fully developed at birth. They reach maturity only during childhood, and require input from the environment to do so. Eyes need light, walking depends on gravity and the maturation of the human language faculty requires that we hear talk in what is to become our mother tongue.
Thus Chomsky branded language as being rooted in nature rather than nurture, as something more to do with hereditary factors than with the social environment, innate rather than acquired. Input from the environment played a relatively superficial role, he maintained. To openly take and defend such a position was not easy in the intellectual climate of the early 1960s, especially in America.
* * *
The mid-twentieth century was the heyday of behaviorism, a school of thought that had held psychology and the humanities in America in a stifling grip since the Roaring Twenties. It was a doctrine that, in its most radical form, denied the existence of virtually all spiritual life and shunned all things purportedly hereditary and innate. To behaviorists, all behavior was the logical outcome of external impulses, as predictable as billiard balls obeying the impact of the cue. This held for man and beast alike. All were born with minds as empty as the proverbial tabula rasa, a clean slate. From these humble beginnings, infants gradually evolved into complex adults through a process of habit formation. All they needed, they picked up from the environment, under the pressures of satisfaction and want, pleasure and pain. In the eyes of a behaviorist, both peopleâs characters and whatever steered their actions were as plastic as wet clay, to be molded at will.
The intellectual father of behaviorism was John B. Watson, an American born in 1878 into a broken, destitute family in a South Carolina backwater. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, he climbed to the rarefied altitudes of a full professorship at Johns Hopkins University. And that was only for starters. Just as he was really hitting his stride, he fell from grace, amid much public fanfare, over an affair with a graduate student that has remained shrouded in mystery to this day. Both his position and his reputation went out the window. But somehow, Watson managed to pull himself out of the mire by his own hair to shine once more, this time as vice president of J. Walther Thompson, one of the most prominent advertising agencies of the day.
Watsonâs career seemed to be living proof of his own claim that he could mold a highly skilled specialist from any healthy infant, regardless of its race and social background. It is also quite understandable that his ideas found so much acclaim, especially in the United States. Watson and his theory epitomized the American dream, the belief that every newspaper boy can become a millionaire, if only he tries hard enough.
By the time Chomsky was in his twenties, behaviorism had spread from psychologists to much wider circles. The conviction that the human mind could be shaped and reshaped at will had achieved almost divine status in the aftermath of World War II. After all, had the Nazis, with their Ăbermensch and their racial theories, not proven beyond any shadow of a doubt what horrendous cruelty could be spawned by heredity-based ideologies? Behaviorism was more than just an alternative. After all the bloodshed, it also offered consolation, hope and reassurance. If all behavior was acquired by learning, then the atrocities of the Germans and their collaborators were not inevitably in our blood. They had simply been misguided, brought up the wrong way, their minds warped. Likewise, to a behaviorist the horrors that the Allies had visited upon their foes in return were but responses to signals received from the Nazis. People could breathe a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that none of this had any bearing on someoneâs true character.
* * *
Chomskyâs conviction that language was a unique, innate property of mankind, residing in a dedicated mental organ, vehemently clashed with the received ideas underpinning the thinking of the Chimpskyans.1 Most prominent among them were the many psychologists and psycho-linguists who in the course of the twentieth century attempted to train gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and other animals to use language. Their jumping-off point was the idea that there were no principled differences between mankind and its closest relatives, apes, and other primates. Some among them were card-carrying behaviorists who abhorred even the slightest hint that something innate might underlie sophisticated behavior, including the use of language. They were convinced that it was only a matter of finding an appropriate conduit, a suitable mode of communication, for an animal to be able to express itself. Once such a conduit were identified, systematic training would produce animals capable of using language. Other Chimpskyans held different, or at least less extreme, views. To them, the tenet that there were no fundamental differences between man and animal was first and foremost of practical importance. It was a useful null hypothesis, a point of departure for their research. If it was wrong, this would become clear when it proved impossible to teach animals to use language.
The adventures of the ape trainers make for fascinating, if only too often dramatic and tragic stories. Take Washoe, who died in 2007. From 1966, when she was in her infancy, until 1970, this chimp was a full member of the Gardner family of Reno, Nevada. The couple, both psychologists, raised her exactly as they would a real child. Washoe ate at their table, wore nappies and slept in a childâs bed. The idea was that she would learn American Sign Language, the sign language of the American deaf. Other apes, like Nim, were kept in purpose-built facilities and trained by an elaborate staff of specialists. But invariably, once they grew past childhood, the animals would become too dangerous to handle, and the project would have to be abandoned. Or, equally invariably, the money would run out. Usually the animals ended up in a lonesome cage, forgotten by their researchers and too domesticated to be released into the wild or become a member of a captive group.
Nim with his favorite caretaker, Laura-Ann Petitto, around 1976 (Copyright Dr. Laura-Ann Petitto, University of Toronto).
Despite all the tall tales to the contrary, this endless series of experiments consistently failed to produce the desired result: a lingual ape. Speech was obviously out of the question, for biomechanical reasons. Apesâ mouths and throats differ from those of humans, making it impossible for them to produce many of the strings of sounds needed for speech. But such shortcomings could be circumvented. Sign language was one option, another was a kind of keyboard with symbols representing objects and actions. Indeed, some apes learned to use symbols to represent foods, frolicking and other desirables of ape life. But that was it. Not a single reliable instance has ever been recorded of an ape producing even the simplest, most rudimentary sentence out of symbols, signs or sounds, or in any other way.
In fact, the âtalkingâ apes bore no resemblance to human language users whatsoever. For one thing, with one or two rare exceptions they showed fairly little interest in the matter. They needed a strong hand to keep them on track, and rarely, if ever, learned anything of their own accord. Their achievements, such as they were, were the painstaking fruits of relentless training. As soon as the trainers left off, progress would not only grind to a halt but most of the apes would stop using the tricks they had acquired altogether. Nothing could be farther from the way normal human children acquire language, with no coaxing at all. Human children cannot not acquire language, and they will keep on talking all their lives. If no one else is around, we will jabber at the dog, chat with the cat, yell at the television and talk to ourselves, be it out loud or silently. All children acquire and use language, and they all do so with no effort whatsoever, regardless of whether they receive explicit instruction or not. Even the scruffiest ten-year-old urchin can put in his two cents with the best of them, thank you very much, although he may not be overly polite or eloquent.
Yet another difference was that no ape ever started naming things the way children do. Moreover, they rarely initiated a âconversation,â and their repertoire never really developed beyond set phrases like âgive me thisâ or âI want that.â They added nothing of their own to what they were taught, and they did not experiment. In short, the whole effort made it eminently clear that, although apes could be pressured into learning and remembering quite a lot, they never got past the aping stage, so to speak, performing tricks that had nothing to do with actual human language.
Quite apart from these experiments with great apes, there was also a steady stream of less bizarre research into the true character of animals. People like Niko Tinbergen of the Netherlands and the Austrian Konrad Lorenz pioneered the field of ethology, the study of the behavior of animals in their natural environment. More and more others followed, scrutinizing more and more different species. Whether these researchers like it or not, the public at large has always understood their work to be an inquiry into how human-like animals behave. This goes some way to explaining why the ethologist Frans de Waalâs books, for instance, meet with such excitement, occasiona...
