 What evolved?
 How?
 When?
 Why?
 Remember all the characteristics that language has
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Hierarchy
Recursion
Variation
Universal among humans
 All these must have evolved in order to get modern
language
 We have also evolved more specialized anatomical
features for language
 Longer vocal tract
 More sensitive hearing
 Theory of mind
 The ability to simulate other people’s thoughts
 Hierarchical thinking
 Could have evolved from social hierarchies
 Monkeys are known to emit certain calls to signal a
change or reinforcement of the social hierarchy
 Symbolic thinking
 Ability to link a concept to something more concrete like
a sound or sequence of sounds, or a picture
 Adaptation
 A combination of genetic mutations, natural selection, genetic drift,
and gene flow could have produced the mental architecture for
language
 Problems
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UG is said to NOT be functional so how could it be selected for?
UG is too specific for things like genetic mutation
Humans were too spread out
Language is a moving target
 Non-adaptation
 Language just kind of happened, maybe as a by-product of brain
size
 The odds of that happening by chance are incredibly unlikely
 Languages could have adapted to the limitations of the human
brain
 Doesn’t account for seemingly non-functional restrictions on
language, like Principles A and B from semantics
 Many people seem to think that it did, trying to reconstruct the
original mother tongue
 Merritt Ruhlen has identified several possible Proto-Sapiens roots
using the methodology of comparative reconstruction
 tik – finger
 akwa – water
 Abilities to comprehend language are found even in bonobos
 Kanzi, perhaps the most famous bonobo to be trained, can
understand novel sentences produced in Simple English
 Suggests that some capacity for language evolved much, much
earlier than the actual use of languages
 Scientists generally believe that the must have been a stage of
protolanguage that lacked some of the features that
characterized
 The alternate scenario would have language evolving with all its
complexity in one generation
 Anatomy
 Vocal cords leave no trace, but the vocoid bone
occasionally appears
 Comparative anatomy among primates
 Location of larynx
 Comparative brain size/structure
 Humans have a comparatively large neocortex
 Not all primates have Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area
 Brains (and especially the cortex) can be too small to support
language
 Some cranial anatomy can be used
 There is a hole in the base of the skull through which a nerve
to the vocal cords go
 The size of that hole is sometimes used as evidence that
vocalizations were more important
 Anthropological evidence
 Hand-tools
 Fashioning handaxes requires a good deal of planning, dexterity,
and spatial reasoning
 Throwing spears requires coordination
 May be evidence for a gestural origin of language
 Artwork
 Shows symbolic thinking
 Much artwork doesn’t appear until 30,000 BCE, way after language is
thought to have appeared
 Comparative social behavior and mental capacity among
primates
 Group size and sociality
 Reasons for vocalizations
 Ability to manage hierarchical thought patterns
 Estimates vary widely
 Some place it at 30,000 years ago, with the advent of
visible culture
 Some place it very far back with the earliest hominids
1,000,000 years ago
 Generally this is said to be protolanguage rather than
full-fledged language
 A safe estimate is between 100,000 and 250,000 years
ago
 Thought
 Some, including Chomsky, have suggested that language
could have evolved for thought
 Ignores social character of language
 Hard to see how language structure could have been shared
mentally
 Produce social bonding
 Dunbar proposes that conversation takes the place of
grooming
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Grooming is an intensely social activity
Neocortex size is roughly correlated with social group size
Humans have a group size of about 150 people
Brain size increased as body hair decreased, leaving less need for
physical grooming
 Language variation has been exapted to serve as a group
marker