Here is the full transcript of Dan Everett’s talk titled “How Language Began” at TEDxSanFrancisco conference.
American linguist and author Dan Everett’s talk titled “How Language Began” delves into the origins and evolution of human language. He explores the concept of signs, ranging from indexes to icons to symbols, and their significance in the development of language. Everett discusses the role of grammar, highlighting three types: G1, G2, and G3, each representing different levels of complexity.
He argues that language is a cultural invention, developed over time within human societies. By studying archaeological evidence, including artifacts left by Homo erectus, Everett suggests that language may have emerged approximately 60,000 generations ago. He emphasizes the power of human language as a tool for communication and cultural expression, shaping the course of human history. Overall, Everett’s talk offers compelling insights into the origins and significance of language in human civilization.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Language: The Greatest Technological Breakthrough
So we’re here in the center of technology, and I just wanted to ask a simple question: What was the greatest technological discovery ever made, the basis for all subsequent technology, and when was it made? The greatest technological breakthrough of human beings is language, invented 2 million years ago in the first and greatest information age by Homo erectus, mom, and dad.
Homo erectus was one of the most successful creatures to ever walk the Earth. They lived on this planet for nearly 2 million years. We have so far lived on this planet for a certain 200,000, perhaps as many as 500,000. So we haven’t lived a quarter of the time that Homo erectus lived on this planet. Homo erectus was a marvelous creature. It had the greatest brain the world had ever seen, maybe the universe had ever seen. The range of size of the Homo erectus brain was about 950 cc, 75% of the size of an adult Homo sapiens male and roughly in the range of many Homo sapiens females – and that proves to us that size doesn’t matter.
Tools and Achievements of Homo Erectus
The Homo erectus brain and body were both phenomenal. That was the first body – Homo erectus stood about as tall as we do. They weighted probably around 150 pounds and they were the first creatures in the history of the universe capable of persistent hunting. Our bipedal gait enables us to run long distances and cool down more efficiently than quadrupeds. So, Homo erectus was actually able to chase down its prey until the prey either died of heat exhaustion, or Homo erectus beat it to death with a stone axe or a club.
Homo erectus was a marvelous creature. And they had many accomplishments. Homo erectus made a variety of tools, starting with the Olduwan tools. And they kept these tools, and they transported these tools, and they improved these tools, so that they had an upgrade: Acheulean tools. And they upgraded this to Levallois tools. And each tool was better than the one before. But they weren’t limited to stone tools.
Homo erectus also made spears, wooden tools that we have found, hundreds-of-thousands-year-old spears. And they made two kinds of spears. They made spears for throwing and spears for thrusting.
Seafaring Homo Erectus
What does a spear for thrusting mean? It means you’re a 5 foot 8 to 6 foot 1 Homo erectus male, 150 pounds, and you run up and stick that spear into a mastodon. These were fierce creatures, these were brave creatures, and they were extremely intelligent creatures. So tools were one of the great accomplishments that lets us know what kind of brain they were developing.
They also had representations of reality. This is a 250,000 year-old partially naturally-formed and partially artificially-formed by humans, by Homo erectus, Venus. It’s called the Venus of Berekhat Ram, and there’s some evidence that it was dyed red in certain parts. A shell found on the island of Java with engravings on the shell by Homo erectus.
Homo erectus wasn’t simply a toolmaker. They were boat makers. They traveled the oceans 2 million years ago. How do we know this? Well, the first island that we find evidence of Homo erectus is the island of Flores in Indonesia, which would have been about a 24-mile boat trip, visible from land, about the size of the English Channel, except that Flores was, then and now, surrounded by the most treacherous and strongest ocean currents in the world. They couldn’t have swum to Flores. They got there by boat.
This is actually the island of Flores, and, it doesn’t, you know – I don’t think Homo erectus looked quite like that, but archaeologists have actually tried to simulate the voyages of Homo Erectus by making rafts similar to the kinds of rafts that Homo erectus would have made. We know because of the amount of islands that we find colonies of Homo erectus that their getting to these islands was more than coincidence. We know by the size of the colonies they must have had there that multiple individuals had to arrive about the same time to start these colonies, and we know therefore that they had to plan.
So one was Flores. Another was Socotra, then and now, 150 miles into the ocean from the nearest land, where we find Homo erectus colonies. That requires imagination, that sailing to something in exploration, and Homo erectus seems to do this. There’s also evidence that Homo erectus had colonies on Crete.
So Homo erectus was a seafarer, Homo erectus was a toolmaker, Homo erectus was a very intelligent person, but they did more than this. Homo erectus also traveled the world by land. Homo erectus evolved 1.9 million years ago. By 1.7 million years ago, which is not very long, they were already in Beijing, they were in Indonesia, they were in the Middle East, they were in Europe.
Homo erectus traveled – I won’t be surprised when the newspaper finally announces that we have evidence of Homo erectus in California because if they could walk to Beijing in a short period of time, it was just a little hop, skip, and a jump up across the Bering Strait down into the New World. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But their abilities show that they were capable of a tremendous amount.
Language and Cognitive Abilities
So now, it’s not all good news, there were some deficiencies. Homo erectus had the vocal apparatus of a gorilla. They couldn’t have made all the sounds that we make. They would have had a range of sounds more like what a gorilla could make. Is that a big deal when it comes to language? Well, no, it isn’t. There are many languages today that have less than twelve sounds, here’s one: “Kuikuro,” that’s one of the languages I’ve worked on in the Amazon over the past 40 years, Kuikuro, and it only has ten sounds if you’re a woman and eleven sounds if you’re a man. And with eleven sounds, you can produce a fully functioning human language.
So was erectus capable of eleven sounds? Well, they didn’t even need to be capable of eleven sounds. You can type anything you can communicate in English into your computer. You can type it in Microsoft Word or whatever program that you use, and when you do that, how many letters does a computer use? Well ultimately, a computer only uses two letters, two sounds: 0 and 1, and with those sounds, you can communicate anything. So erectus, theoretically, only needed to be able to make two sounds to communicate.
Our ancestors were the first and only talking gorillas, with the anatomy that they had. Their brains not only were smaller, they were somewhat slower than ours by the evidence, their childhood development was faster than ours, which is a disadvantage cognitively because our children have more time to develop – I think it’s about 30 years now – and they are able to put into place all sorts of cognitive mechanisms. When I tell this joke in college, nobody laughs, but …
But we know. So Homo erectus had advantages and disadvantages, but the most important thing is that none of the disadvantages would’ve kept it from language and the accomplishments we see. Right now, scientists are excavating a Homo erectus village, about 750,000 years old, in Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in modern-day Israel. And we find that this village is organized hierarchically. There’s a section of the village for processing animal products, a section of the village for processing plant products, another section of the village where we find evidence of the habitation.
So, they not only built villages, they built them in a structured manner. So they were capable of hierarchical thought, they were capable of planning, they were capable of imagination. What makes language? What was lacking for them to have language? A language is just, in essence, two things: symbols and grammar.
The Nature of Signs
And how many symbols do you need, and how much grammar do you need? What’s a symbol, first of all? Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher from the United States who lived over a hundred years ago, defined three kinds of signs: Indexes, which are signs that are physically connected to what they represent. So, you go outside, you smell smoke, you know there’s a fire. Smoke is an index of fire. You see a footprint, that’s an index.
And the next sign – So, all animals need signs. Our five senses evolved for us to be able to read indexes. Without indexes and the ability to read them, we can’t function in the world.
The next kind of sign is an icon – there’s no physical connection, but there is a physical resemblance. The figure of Berekhat Ram, the Venus, that I showed earlier, that is an icon. The Mona Lisa is an icon. The cross in Christianity started off as an icon and has become a symbol. So you get this. So, what is a symbol then? The symbol is conventionally a sign that is conventionally or culturally connected to its meaning.
Not all languages have mathematics. Piraha, for example, doesn’t have even the number one. There are no mathematical concepts in that language whatsoever. So math is a cultural discovery, if not a cultural construct, and not everyone has math in that sense. So the symbols for math are culturally determined. Symbols are culturally determined. The next thing we need to have a language – and here’s a fascinating fact – When Peirce said that indexes come first, or more simple, and then icons, and then symbols, he inadvertently, indirectly predicted exactly what we find in the archaeological record.
Icons in Archaeology
So indexes all creatures have. Those are 5 billion years old or however long life’s been on Earth, closer to 4 billion. But, when did the first icon, the first image, appear in the archaeological record? Well, we have to go back 3 million years, which is not that far back, to Australopithecus africanus. And we find in a cave of Australopithecus, the Makapansgat cave of Australopithecus in South Africa, a small, little two-inch by three-inch stone called the Makapansgat pebble or the Makapansgat manuport because it was carried to the cave, and some Australopithecus recognized on this little stone a human face.
So first, we see icons – first, we see indexes, then we see icons, and next we see symbols. So, what can a symbol be? Think of a shovel. Often when people talk about symbols they think of abstract art, but abstract art isn’t necessary for symbols. Think of a shovel. A shovel is a tool, but when we see a shovel, we think of labor, we think of blisters, we think of gardening, we think of our family – all sorts of memories.
Grammatical Complexity and Evolution
The tools that erectus used were easily understood as symbols. In the way that they were taken care of, they represented it. In fact, we find a special hand axe, Excalibur, a colored quartz hand axe buried in an erectus burial site that indicates that they saw in this tool, as I’m saying, something symbolic. So, they had symbols, they had the capability for symbols, they had planning, they had hierarchical reasoning, they had ordered thought.
So they needed a grammar. So what kinds of grammars are there? Well, there is one popular theory of grammar by someone I will not mention, but this particular theory of grammar is a little more elaborate than we need. I have identified three kinds of grammar in my field research over the last 40 years. One I’ll call G1, the next one is G2, and the last one, very originally, is G3.
The Emergence of Language
G1 grammars are just grammars in linear order. We have examples of this in English: “You drink, you drive, you go to jail.” “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” It’s just words in order. But the next kind of grammar, a G2 grammar – and let me point out that there are modern languages, such as Riau of Indonesia and Pirahã, in which serious psycholinguists have argued that their grammars are this G1 type – just words in linear order.
A G2 grammar has hierarchy, so “If you drink and you drive, then you go to jail.” You take the words and you make a larger sentence. And a G3 grammar has hierarchy and recursion: “If you drink and drive and know you shouldn’t do that because your wife’s going to get upset because her father told you the last time you did he was never going to give you bond money again,” and you can just keep on going.
The Power of Language
Those kinds of grammars are found commonly in the world’s languages, but you can express anything from a G3 grammar in a G1 grammar; mathematically they’re all of equal power. So, once you have symbols and a G1 grammar you have language, full-blown human language. We find those today. Was Homo erectus capable of that? Yes, they were. Did they show the kinds of communication, correction, cooperation, planning that would have required human language? Yes, they did.
Language as a Cultural Invention
All animals communicate – there’s not a single animal in the animal species that doesn’t communicate – but it still seems that only humans communicate by means of language. Only humans have elaborate, symbolic, grammatical systems that allow us to communicate. But is there anything about what we’ve said that requires that grammars be a mutation? Or that grammars be innate? Or that grammars be an instinct? Does it seem any more than that there is an instinct for chemistry, or an instinct for building cars, or an instinct for making burritos.
So language, by all that we see, has been invented, it has been developed over time. So as soon as a culture gets hold of language, it starts to change it. Languages are always changing. Sometimes they become more elaborate, sometimes they become simpler. Homo erectus started the process of language through the accomplishments that they had, through what we know about their reasoning abilities, and through the artifacts and villages and evidence of voyages that they left in the archaeological record. Language started, if this is all correct – I urge upon you the view that it is – if this is all correct, language started then 60,000 generations ago.
The Legacy of Language
It’s one of the greatest breakthroughs, the beginning of the information age for humanity, it enabled every other accomplishment of our species. And if we go back to this guy, we’ll call him Johnny Erectus, in the sense of upright as opposed to other senses. And he is the person who first spoke. The first person perhaps who said to someone else, “I love you.” Or who said, “Let’s go.” Or, “I want that.” Imagine the possibilities and the elaborations – 60,000 generations of language.
TED talks are an example of an attempt to harness the power of human language. There is nothing more powerful on Earth than human language. We still don’t understand everything about it, but we know that it makes us who we are – the ability to speak and communicate with one another. But as you leave TED this evening, as you leave these talks and this day that we’ve spent together, use language, talk, and listen, and appreciate the value of this marvelous invention that these talking gorillas, Homo erectus, our ancestors, the first humans to walk the Earth, gave us. Thank you.