Who spoke the first words?
Language is a powerful piece of social technology. It conveys your thoughts as coded puffs of air or dozens of drawn symbols, to be decoded by someone else. It can move information about the past, present and future, formalise ideas, trigger action, persuade, cajole and deceive.
Today, . All human societies have language, and no language is “better” than any other: all can communicate the full range of human experience. To those of us who study human evolution, this incredible universality suggests that our species has had language right from when Homo sapiens arose in Africa between 200,000 and 160,000 years ago. A more recent origin could not explain how groups that stayed in Africa after H. sapiens migrated to the rest of the world 60,000 years ago also have language.
If H. sapiens has always had language, could other extinct human species have had it too? Some believe that Neanderthals did – which would imply we both inherited it from our common ancestor some 500,000 or more years ago. This theory is consistent with the discovery that FOXP2, a gene that is essential to speech, is identical at two key positions in humans and Neanderthals but different in chimpanzees. But a single gene is not enough to explain language. And recent genetic evidence shows that the Neanderthal brain regulated its version of FOXP2 differently.
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What’s more, language is inherently symbolic – sounds stand for words that stand for real objects and actions. But there is scant evidence that Neanderthals had art or other symbolic behaviour – a few pieces of pigment and some disputed etchings. By comparison, the humans who lived alongside them in Western Europe painted beautiful murals, made musical instruments and had a wide variety of tools and weapons.
Suggestions that language evolved even earlier – for example in Homo erectus, an upright ape that walked on the African savannah two million years ago – are little more than idle speculation. It seems more likely, from the existing evidence at least, that our ability to bend each other’s ears is indeed unique.
Why did we evolve language?
Our language skills didn’t come for free. Humans had to evolve complex brain circuits and sophisticated machinery in order to speak, and spend precious years teaching their children. Why pay that price?
Many people attribute our linguistic skills to our large brains, ability to make complex hand gestures, distinctive vocal tracts and to the gene FOXP2, which gives us the fine-tuned control of our facial muscles. But on their own, these traits do not explain why we evolved language. There are animals with larger brains, gesturing is widespread among primates and some bird species can imitate human speech without our descended larynx or our particular version of FOXP2.
“Tok, tik, dik and tak may all descend from an ancient word for toe“
Instead, the feature that most clearly separates us from other animals is the sophistication of our symbolic and cooperative social behaviour. Humans are the only species that routinely exchanges favours, goods and services with others outside their immediate family. We have an elaborate division of labour, we specialise at tasks and then trade our products with others. And we have learned to act in coordinated ways outside the family unit, such as when a nation goes to war or people combine their efforts to build a bridge.
We take the complexity of our social behaviour for granted, but all these actions rest on the ability to negotiate, bargain, reach agreements and hold people to them. This requires a conduit – like a modern USB cable – to carry complex information back and forth between individuals. Language is that conduit.
Some social insects – ants, bees and wasps – have a level of cooperation without language. But they tend to belong to highly related family groups, genetically programmed to act largely for the good of the group. Human societies must police anyone who tries to take advantage. With words and symbols, we can expose them as cheats and tarnish their reputations. We can lavish praise on those worthy of it, whose reputations will be elevated even among those they have never met: words can travel further than a single action.
All these complicated social acts require more than the grunts, chirrups, odours, colours and roars of the rest of the animal kingdom. They tell us why we and we alone have language: our particular brand of sociality could not exist without it.
What were the first words?
It’s a fair guess that there was once an original mother tongue – the ancestor to all living and dead human languages. The evidence for this is that all human languages, unlike other forms of animal communication, string together words into sentences that have subjects, verbs and objects (“I kicked the ball”), and anyone can learn any language.
Comparative linguists search for sounds that come up again and again in languages from all over the world. They argue that if any relics of a mother tongue still exist today, they will be in those sounds. Merritt Ruhlen at Stanford University in California, for example, argues that sounds like tok, tik, dik, and tak are repeatedly used in different languages to signify a toe, a digit or the number one. Although studies by Ruhlen and others are contentious, the list of words they say are globally shared because they sound almost the same also includes who, what, two and water.
Another approach is to look at words that change very slowly over long periods of time. My own team has used such statistical studies to show that words for the numbers 1 to 5 are some of the slowest evolving. Also on this list are words involved in social communication, like who, what, where, why, when, I, you, she, he and it. This list fits with the expectation that language evolved because of its social role (see “Why did we evolve language?”, page 28). It also has some overlap with Ruhlen’s list.
More broadly, we can say with some confidence that the first words probably fitted into just a few categories. The first ones may have been simple names, like those used by some of our primate relatives. Vervet monkeys give distinct alarm calls for leopards, martial eagles and pythons, and young vervets must learn these. In humans, mama is a strong candidate for a very early noun, given how naturally the sound appears in babbling and how dependent babies are on their mothers. The sound “m” is also present in nearly all the world’s languages.
Imperatives like look or listen are also likely to have appeared early on, perhaps alongside verbs like stab or trade that would have helped coordinate hunting or exchanges. Even this simple lexicon allows sentences like “look, wildebeest” or “trade arrows”. Finally, simple social words like you, me and I, yes and no, were probably part of our early vocab. Amusingly, , prompting headlines that it was among the first human words. Perhaps it was the second.
This article appeared in print under the headline “How humans evolved language, and who said what first”
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