Here is the full transcript of Michael Corballis’ talk titled “The Origins and Evolution of Language” at TEDxAuckland conference.
Psychologist and author Michael Corballis’ talk titled “The Origins and Evolution of Language” delves into the fascinating journey of how human language has evolved from gestural communication to the complex linguistic systems we use today. He highlights the importance of bipedalism in freeing up the hands and face for gestural communication, suggesting that language likely began as a form of mime among early humans.
Corballis argues against the notion of a sudden linguistic mutation, proposing instead a gradual evolution of language from gestures to spoken words. He also discusses the diversification of languages as humans spread across the globe, adapting to different geographies and cultures. The talk concludes by exploring the future of language, emphasizing the shift towards digital communication and the continuous evolution of language as a dynamic and integral aspect of human civilization.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Mystery of Language
Language is probably the hardest problem in science. Nobody really knows how it works, and nobody really knows where it came from. And yet, we can all do it. I think it’s a bit like driving a car. We can drive a car, but we don’t really know how the machine works. One of the things that makes language unique, I think, is that we can generate new sentences all the time. There’s an infinite capacity to say something different. In this talk, you will probably hear some sentences you’ve never heard before, yet I hope you can understand them.
Animal language, or animal communication, on the other hand, is mostly repetitive, automatic, and emotional, and doesn’t create new meanings. The English comedian Stephen Fry once uttered the following sentence: “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.” That sentence, I think he was confident in believing, had never been uttered before, and I’m happy to repeat it here, in case you need it. To compound the problem, there are something like 6,000 different languages in the world, most of them impenetrable to any other.
So, most people will speak one or maybe two languages, or perhaps four or five, but there are well over 5,000 languages that will be totally impenetrable to you. If I were to do this talk in Bantu, or Navajo, or perhaps even Portuguese, you wouldn’t understand what I’m saying. So that’s an added problem. How can there be so many languages, each of them impenetrable to all of the others?
The Paradox of Language Acquisition
Any child, though, can learn any one of those languages, provided they start early enough. So that’s a paradox. Any kid can learn any one of them, yet most of us only learn one or two of them.
OK, now, how are we to solve that problem? The common solution is that language is a miracle. A miraculous thing that happened all at once. That comes from the Bible, the Old Testament. According to the Old Testament, the Lord gave language to Adam. The people then grew proud, and they built the Tower of Babel in an attempt to get closer to heaven. But the Lord was a vengeful God, and he destroyed the Tower, the people scattered, and so did the languages. And that is the biblical account of why we have so many languages.
Now, the foremost linguist of our time is Noam Chomsky, who’s made actually considerable contributions to how we put language together. But his notion of how language evolved, I think, is positively biblical. What he thinks is that roughly 90,000 years ago, a mutation happened in one individual. He doesn’t call that individual Adam; he calls that individual Prometheus, for some reason, known to him. And from there, it spread to all other people, and eventually created all the languages of the world.
Evolutionary Perspectives on Language
That’s a biblical story, really, because it says language happened in a single individual once, with a single mutation of some sort, and I don’t think it makes biological sense. There is a representation of the last seven million years of human evolution since we separated from the great apes. Humans are right on the very right-hand end of that, a tiny blip in the last seven million years. We evolved, it seems, about 200,000 years ago.
And according to Chomsky, language only emerged about halfway through that span of 200,000 years. And I’ll show you that. That’s where the miracle happened. And to me, that doesn’t make much sense because you’ve got all those millions of years of human evolution from when we decided not to be great apes anymore. That would be offensive, I think, to Charles Darwin, although he’s not still around to complain.
He argued that any complex organ, like language, or like the liver, or the heart, or the brain, must have evolved through successive, numerous, slight modifications. And if anybody could find an exception to that, that would destroy his theory of evolution. But Chomsky’s theory, then, might be that one case. And if Chomsky is right, then evolutionary theory would be destroyed, in Darwin’s own terms.
Now, I want to try and demonstrate to you that language didn’t arise from vocal calls. It arose from gestures.
Gestures and the Origins of Language
That language started from making gestures. And I put one hand in my pocket so that I won’t demonstrate too volubly, but I’ve still got one I can wave around. One piece of evidence for that actually comes from the monkey brain. And that takes us back about 30 or 40 million years, in terms of a common ancestor.
There’s an area, a circuit, in the monkey brain that is dedicated to making grasp actions, to reaching out and picking things up. It’s called the mirror system because that system is active whenever the monkey reaches out for something, or when it sees another animal, or person even, reaching out and making the same movement.
So it maps what the monkey sees onto what the monkey can do. Some people have called it a “monkey-see, monkey-do” circuit.
Now, it turns out that the equivalent circuit in the human brain is the language circuit. And you’ll see that on the slide there. So thus, the language areas in the brain seem to have arisen from this mirror circuit in the monkey brain. So, in the course of evolution, that circuit seems to have been taken over, or at least used, partly to deal with language.
Now, moving forward a bit in evolution towards ourselves, no one has ever been able to teach a great ape to talk, or come anywhere near it. Then people had the idea that maybe we can teach them to sign, to gesture. And there have been a number of cases, I’ve shown a couple of them there, in which quite reasonable conversations have been had between humans and apes, by use of sign language, or something like it. So they can ask, or make simple requests, and be understood, and the person can respond, and have a little conversation.
It’s not a very good conversation in many ways. They can’t sort of tell you what they did yesterday, or gossip about each other, but they can make requests, and make little sentences that are somewhat generative in the way that human language is. Another famous case is Kanzi, who’s a bonobo. Kanzi uses a kind of an iPad, I guess, but it’s a display of symbols, and he points to these symbols; they represent objects and actions. So he can also ask for things, and have little conversations with one of his helpers there, as you will see.
So that shows you, I think, that in great apes, they come closer to language, by either pointing to something, or using a form of sign language. It’s now also known, and this has become a hot topic recently, that if you look at apes in the wild, they make lots and lots of gestures that seem much more language-like than their vocalizations are. So they’re much more flexible.
As you can see there, some of them you can almost recognize what they’re trying to say. The one on the top left there is quite interesting. It’s asking to be… I’m sorry, that’s actually grooming. I think the one on the bottom left is asking to be groomed in that spot. So the ape will sometimes point to a part of the body it wants some other animal to come along and scratch. And you can see a bit of a gossip session there, on the bottom right. Now it’s also moving forward to humans. We know, of course, that sign language is purely gestural.
It’s done silently. It’s done with gestures of the hands, of course, but it’s also done with gestures of the face. So that’s a powerful argument, I think, that language, at least, can be purely gestural, and just as effective as speech. We now know that sign language is linguistically sophisticated. It uses the same brain areas that spoken language does, and there’s a university in the United States called Gallaudet University which, in fact, uses only sign language in all its classes, even when it teaches poetry. So there are forms of poetry in sign.
Now we also all gesture as we speak. There’s me gesturing. I didn’t put my hand in my pocket then, but I still had one hand free, and I was gesturing a bit while I was talking. But in the background, you will see there’s somebody translating me into sign. So that person is making somewhat similar gestures as I was making while I was gesturing while I was talking. So that does show somewhat of a correspondence between signing, I think, and speaking.
The Evolution of Human Communication
There’s another picture of me gesturing, and you might notice if you look carefully that my colleagues there look extremely bored. Now, I apologize if I’m doing that to you. One of them has actually died, you will notice. Now, I think the critical thing that happened between us and apes was bipedalism. So at some point in human evolution, beginning really when we switched from apehood, and we gradually became more and more upright, and that of course freed the hands and the face for a gestural kind of communication. And that’s where I think it began to become sophisticated.
So we began to be able to create meanings by combining gestures in various ways. I think it probably developed into a form of mime, so that people began to mime things they wanted to talk about, either something that they’d seen on their expeditions at hunter-gathering or whatever, or maybe what they planned to do tomorrow, or maybe even gossip about it to each other in gestural form, mimicking each other. So I think it probably began as a language-like thing, beyond what apes can do, from around about 6 or 7 million years, but beginning especially I think about 6 million years ago as I’ll try to demonstrate. So there’s our picture again of hominin evolution, that’s ourselves, from about 7 million years ago.
The Diversification of Language
It’s a bit tragic, of course, that all of them, there are about 20 different hominin species there that are beyond the apes, and they’ve all become extinct with one exception. And that’s again that tiny little blip called Homo sapiens on the right. So be careful out there on the street, because all of our other cousin species are no longer with us.
OK, so what happened then is there was increasing bipedalism through that period, and we probably became fully bipedal about 2 million years ago. And that gives us much more canvas to play on if we’re trying to understand how language actually came about. It makes more sense I think than supposing there was a sudden mutation 50,000 or 90,000 years ago that suddenly gave us language.
That to me makes no biological sense. I should add, by the way, that the idea that there was a sudden event is widely held, not just by Chomsky, but by a lot of archaeologists. Although most biologists I talk to think it doesn’t make sense. OK, now then you might ask, why 6,000 languages? So what happened, I think, in that course? We started out by kind of miming, but then it became less iconic and more arbitrary.
The Evolution and Impact of Language
So language became simplified. So it kind of gradually lost its pictorial component. It’s more efficient to reduce the symbols that we use with our hands into something that’s more conventional or decided by people arbitrarily than it is to try to make them mimic what it is that you see out there.
So there’s more room for variation. So I think as people scattered, that came out of Africa about 90,000 years ago, scattered around the world, the languages that they use adapted to geography and culture and religion perhaps. So that’s why these things all became different.
Now, they became more different than you might expect because I think that’s because we partly designed language to keep other people out, so that people won’t understand us. So language is not only a means of communicating, it’s a means of preventing communication. It’s a kind of a fortress that we build around us, a silo if you like. So that’s in a way the downside of language, and especially speech where it can be quite arbitrary where you decide what sounds will correspond to what things.
The Future of Language and Communication
Just to recap then, I’m maintaining here that language started with a grasping reflex, as you see on the left, a kind of genuinely communicative act by great apes through to something like Homo erectus, who probably has a much more sophisticated way of signing and perhaps the beginnings of grunts and things that were turned into speech, but also the beginnings of tools.
So I think as we lost the manual component, then what happened was we freed up the hands a second time. The first freeing of the hands was bipedalism, but then as language began to develop gesturally, we began to lose the manual component again and put the thing in the face. So language becomes more dedicated to the face, which is also a very expressive organ, and eventually, I think we put it into the mouth, which is a brilliant idea, really.
It’s the first example, I think, of miniaturization. For the whole thing, instead of having to move your whole body around as you communicate, it’s tucked away neatly into the mouth and frees up the hands for doing other things, and in particular for making things.
OK, now, I think it didn’t stop there. Obviously, language didn’t stop with speech. We have developed many more different forms of language since we decided to speak, and each of those changes, including speech itself, has been of enormous importance to our species, I think, and it’s of growing importance.
It starts perhaps with reading and writing. Which adds a dimension. For a start, it gives language memory. So once you start writing things down, then they become permanently stored, and you can go back to them at any point in time. Then it gains distance. When we’ve got radio, telephones, then you begin to be able to communicate at vast distances, and we go to the internet where you can communicate instantly with people on the other side of the world and finally to the cell phone, which is perhaps the ultimate, really. It’s got both memory and distance and computation.
So we’ve kind of, in a way now, got communication to such a level where we’ve almost emptied our minds into our communication systems. In a way, then, we’re also returning to visual language. Writing, of course, is visual, and the cell phone is visual. Some of you are perhaps already using gestures with your thumbs, communicating on your cell phones.
So we’ve gone, if you like, I suppose, with the cell phone from the wagging of tongues to the wiggling of thumbs. Thank you for listening. I’m going to give one more gesture, which is one of the few that I know. Thank you.