The Question Nobody Can Answer

How Language Was Born

Chapter One: The Question Nobody Can Answer

There is a question so old and so difficult that the Linguistic Society of Paris banned it in 1866.

The society, founded just four years earlier, was the most prestigious gathering of language scholars in the world. Its members had devoted their lives to understanding how languages work, how they change over time, how they relate to one another. They were serious scientists, precise thinkers, people with little patience for idle speculation.

And they banned this question anyway. Explicitly, formally, in their founding statutes. No papers on the origin of language would be accepted. No debates on the subject would be permitted. The topic was simply off the table.

The reason was not that the question was unimportant. The reason was that it was unanswerable. Language leaves no fossils. You cannot dig up a word. You cannot find the remains of a conversation in a layer of sediment and date it with carbon. The origin of language was, the society concluded, a problem beyond the reach of science, a question that generated more heat than light, more philosophy than fact.

For about a century, most serious linguists agreed. The origin of language was the domain of myth, speculation, and amateur theorizing, not legitimate scholarship.

Then everything changed.

In the last few decades, a convergence of new sciences has brought the question back from exile. Genetics has revealed things about the human genome that language researchers never expected to find. Paleoanthropology has discovered fossils that shed light on the anatomy of speech. Neuroscience has mapped the brain structures that make language possible. Comparative studies of animal communication have clarified, with new precision, exactly what is unique about the way humans talk. And archaeology has found, in objects left behind by our ancestors, indirect but tantalizing evidence of minds capable of symbolic thought.

We still cannot answer the question with certainty. But we can now approach it with evidence. And what the evidence suggests is a story more complex, more gradual, and more deeply woven into what it means to be human than anyone previously imagined.

This is that story. Or as much of it as we currently know.

Start with the strangeness of language itself.

Every human society that has ever existed has had language. Not some societies. Not most societies. Every single one, without exception, across all of recorded history and as far back as archaeology and anthropology can see. Languages differ enormously in their sounds, their grammar, their vocabulary, their structure. Some languages have two or three vowel sounds. Some have more than thirty. Some are tonal, meaning the pitch of a word changes its meaning. Others are not. Some rely heavily on the order of words in a sentence. Others encode meaning through suffixes and prefixes and can arrange their words in almost any order without losing sense.

But beneath all this variation, something is constant. Every human language has nouns and predicates, some way of naming things and saying something about them. Every human language has a way of talking about the past, the present, and the future. Every human language has a way of asking questions, of negating statements, of expressing possibility and conditionality. Every human language has an essentially unlimited capacity for new sentences. No human language has a fixed number of things that can be said in it.

This last property, which the linguist Noam Chomsky called productivity and which is sometimes called creativity or open-endedness, is perhaps the most remarkable thing about language. You can say a sentence that has never been said before in the history of the world, and any fluent speaker of your language will understand you immediately. The sentences you are hearing right now are, in all likelihood, unique combinations of words that have never appeared in exactly this sequence before. And yet they are perfectly comprehensible.

Animals communicate. This is not in dispute. Bees perform elaborate dances that convey the direction and distance of food sources. Vervet monkeys have distinct alarm calls for different predators, different sounds for eagle, snake, and leopard, each triggering a different response in the group. Whales sing songs of enormous complexity that travel across ocean basins. Chimpanzees in captivity can learn to use hundreds of symbols and combine them in simple ways.

But none of these systems has open-endedness. A bee cannot modify its dance to convey that the flowers are beautiful but the bees there are unfriendly and the trip is probably not worth it unless you really enjoy that particular kind of pollen. A vervet monkey cannot say anything that was not already in its small repertoire of calls. A signing chimpanzee, after years of training, can combine symbols in simple ways, but the sentences stay short, the grammar stays shallow, and nothing in the system suggests the infinite generativity that human children acquire seemingly effortlessly by the age of five.

Human language is not simply more communication. It is a different kind of thing.

The question of how that different kind of thing came to exist is what we are here to explore.

It is worth acknowledging at the outset that this question is genuinely hard in a way that most scientific questions are not. Most things we want to understand left some kind of trace. We can study the formation of galaxies because light from distant galaxies still reaches us. We can study the evolution of the eye because eyes fossilize, and the evolutionary precursors of eyes, from light-sensitive patches of cells to rudimentary lenses, can be traced through the fossil record. We can study the development of tools because stone tools survive for millions of years.

Language does not survive. The sounds vanish the moment they are made. The neural patterns that generated them dissolve with the brain that held them. Even writing, the oldest form of language preservation, goes back only about five thousand years. Before that, everything is inference, everything is reconstruction, everything is the detective work of scientists trying to read the clues left by a crime that happened before anyone was watching.

But there are clues. Surprising ones. Clues in the shape of ancient bones, in the structure of our genes, in the architecture of the brain, in the behavior of children learning to speak, in the way sign languages spontaneously arise in communities of deaf people who have never been taught one, in the parallels and differences between human languages and the communication systems of our closest animal relatives.

Over the chapters ahead, we will follow those clues as far as they go.

We will ask when language began, and discover that the answer depends on what we mean by language. We will ask what physical changes made speech possible, and discover that the human body has been reshaped, in ways both obvious and subtle, specifically for the task of talking. We will ask how the first words came to mean anything at all, and discover that this is one of the deepest puzzles in all of cognitive science. We will ask how a single language, or a small number of early languages, became the seven thousand living languages of today. And we will ask, finally, what language does to the mind that uses it, whether we think with language or merely in it, and whether people who speak different languages are, in some meaningful sense, living in different worlds.

These are not small questions. They are among the biggest questions there are. They touch the deepest things about what kind of creature the human being is, what sets us apart from everything else that has ever lived on this planet, how we came to be able to do what no other species has done, which is not merely to communicate, but to tell stories about the past, to make promises about the future, to share ideas that do not yet exist, to say things that are not true, and in doing so to imagine worlds that might be.

The Paris ban was understandable. The question seemed unanswerable.

It is still hard.

But the story it points toward is extraordinary.

Let us begin.