Masters of the Planet (37 page)

The signal of this effect in the five hundred or so languages analyzed by Atkinson is weaker than the one found in the genes, but this difference is plausibly due to the rapidity with which languages evolve. The key thing, though, is that the genetic and phonemic patterns are essentially the same, and that both point to an origin in Africa. Atkinson's analysis suggests that the convergence point may be in southwestern Africa, which is also in line with one recent genetic study. And his results imply not only that modern
Homo sapiens
originated in a single place, but also that the same thing was true for language (or at least, for the form of language that survives today). In which case, there is a strong argument for a fundamental synergy between biology and language in the rapid takeover of the world by articulate modern people.

THE TRANSITION

There are many reasons why the invention of language is the obvious candidate for the stimulus that tipped our ancestors over the symbolic edge. Although all modern societies are already linguistic, and have been for a long time, we do know from direct observation that structured pidgin languages that substitute signing for sounds can be created quickly, and without external prompting. The most famous example is a signed language spontaneously developed by deaf children in Nicaragua during the 1980s. When the first schools for the deaf were established in that country during the 1970s, they brought together children who had formerly been isolated at home, among speaking relatives who did not sign. Forming a deaf community for the first time, the kids rapidly and independently created a signed language of their own: one that quickly developed many of the complexities of spoken language, though it bore no relation to the Spanish that was spoken around them.

What's
more, in an incredible story, an adult human has been observed going through the process of acquiring language, a procedure that clearly involved a dawning recognition that objects can have names, the most basic of symbols. In her book
A Man Without Words,
the sign-language expert Susan Schaller affectingly describes how she realized that a deaf student in her class not only was unable to sign, but was unaware that other people used names to denote objects. This man, whom she called Ildefonso, had been brought up in a hearing household, in isolation from any stimuli that could have helped him grasp that objects had names. What's more, he lacked access to any kind of special education that might have taught him to mentally create and recognize signs. Yet, although withdrawn, he functioned well enough to find his way into Schaller's classroom, and once there, he immediately gave her the impression of being both intelligent and intellectually curious. As she tells it, Schaller initially tried to teach Ildefonso the rudiments of American Sign Language (ASL), but soon perceived that he did not grasp even the concept of signs. Modifying her approach, she eventually achieved a breakthrough. Ildefonso, in a flash of insight, understood that everything had a name. “Suddenly he sat up, straight and rigid. . . . The whites of his eyes expanded, as if in terror. . . . He broke through. . . . He had entered the universe of humanity, discovered the communion of minds.” This changed everything about his perception of the world, and, once he had recovered from the emotional flood his dawning comprehension unleashed, he became hungry for signs, demanding new words.

Understandably, after 27 years without language, without symbols, this realization was also hugely traumatic. Schaller writes movingly of Ildefonso's sense of grief as he perceived “the prison where he had existed alone, shut out of the human race.” Still, despite the fact that he subsequently had all of the language-learning difficulties and discouragements that every adult experiences, and much more to boot, he eventually learned to converse in ASL.

Schaller's experience with Ildefonso is as close as anyone in our time will ever come to witnessing what the birth of symbolic humanity must have been like, as an adventitiously prepared brain suddenly discovered
what
it was capable of. Schaller even believes that Ildefonso's condition is more common than one might imagine, and that many people's “intelligent, sane, yet languageless” state may be routinely mistaken by hearing or signing people for simple deafness with failure to sign. If this is indeed the case, maybe we have in Ildefonso at least a sideways glimpse into the prelinguistic human condition—albeit greatly modified by the loss of earlier systems of communication, and of the cognitive sequelae that went along with them.

Unfortunately, Ildefonso was not of much help in determining what would it be like to be a normal
Homo sapiens
with everything except linguistic function. It eventually came to light that he had belonged to a small community of deaf and languageless individuals who communicated by miming, rather than by signing. Instead of describing their experiences concisely by stringing words together according to rules, they acted those experiences out, rather like guests at a dinner party playing charades. This was a hugely cumbersome way of communicating, so much so that once he had grasped the idea of language and had begun to compile an extensive vocabulary of signs, Ildefonso no longer had the patience to use it, and stopped spending time with his former associates. What's more, he proved extremely reluctant to describe his inner life before he acquired language. There was perhaps no way in which he could have explained the difference; and in any event, he just didn't want to publicly relive it. How and to what extent language is separate or different from what we experience as thought thus remains imponderable on the basis of this particular individual's experience.

This is a pity, because knowing the exact difference between mental processes with and without words is critical to understanding the cognitive difference between nonsymbolic and symbolic
Homo sapiens.
Those early nonsymbolic Levantine
Homo sapiens
got along perfectly well, living lifestyles that were much like those of the crafty and accomplished Neanderthals. And while their nonlinguistic state was limiting compared to our own, presumably they and their predecessors were not living in the oppressive cognitive darkness from which Ildefonso was so relieved to have escaped. They were perfectly fine, with lifestyles of a complexity that no organism before them had ever contrived to achieve.

Perhaps
we can catch an indirect glimpse of what being a prelinguistic
Homo sapiens
might have been like in the experience of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke that deprived her for several years of her linguistic capacity. At the age of 37 she lost her command of language, and as a consequence all her memories disappeared and she found herself able to live only in the present. On the other hand, she also felt a sense of peace, and of unaccustomed connectedness to the world around her. Her previous command of language had, it seemed, not only allowed her but compelled her to distance herself from her surroundings; and this, of course, is the essence of the human symbolic facility, which confers the capacity to objectify oneself and remain apart from one's universe.

Taylor's experience, recounted after a full recovery, is a fascinating one. It's nonetheless obvious that a cerebral accident in a speaking adult cannot precisely recreate the functioning of a normal prelinguistic human brain. But there may be another avenue by which we can envisage the nonlinguistic human state. Some psychologists have argued persuasively that young children who have not yet mastered their parents' language do not think, at least in the way that adults do. And it's possible that their mental manipulations of information may resemble those of prelinguistic
Homo sapiens
in some respects. Still, while it's clear that children who aren't yet talking don't think like linguistic adults, their brains are of course immature (especially in the all-important prefrontal cortex, which matures notably late), and they can't make all the connections between different kinds of information that adults do. What's more, they cannot tell us articulately about their mental states, which they can only express through emotional acting out. And this brings us right back to the dilemma of understanding the chimpanzee that we encountered in the first paragraphs of this book.

It is evident from the archaeological record that complex lifestyles, intuitive understanding, and mental clarity are all possible in hominids lacking language in its modern form. In the appropriate context, to be wordless is not to be dysfunctional. Nonetheless, words are a crucial enabling factor in complex cognition. The ability to manipulate words clearly expands and liberates the mind. The more words you have, the more complex a world you are able to visualize; and, on the other side
of
the coin, when you run out of words you run out of explicit concepts. Nevertheless, given that our language abilities seem to have been somehow grafted on to the earlier cognitive substrate possessed by the first anatomical
Homo sapiens,
our mental lives today are a constant tightrope-walk between the symbolic and the intuitive. Our symbolic abilities explain our possession of reason, while intuition, which is itself probably a curious amalgam of the rational and the emotional, accounts for our creativity. It is the fortuitous combination of the two that makes us the unstoppable if imperfect force in Nature that we are.

The changeover of
Homo sapiens
from a nonsymbolic, nonlinguistic species to a symbolic, linguistic one is the most mind-boggling cognitive transformation that has ever happened to any organism. The details of this transition will probably forever evade us, and almost any scenario we might dream up risks trivializing it. But, with the examples of the Nicaraguan schoolchildren and Ildefonso in mind, perhaps it is not too hard to envision, at least in principle, how language might have emerged in a small community of biologically prepared early
Homo sapiens
somewhere in Africa. Indeed, I am greatly entertained by the notion that the first language was the invention of children, who are typically much more receptive to new ideas than adults are. They always have their own methods of doing things, and they communicate in ways that sometimes deliberately mystify their parents. For reasons that had nothing to do with language, the children concerned already had all of the peripheral anatomical equipment necessary to produce the full range of sounds demanded by modern languages. They must also have possessed both the biological substrate necessary to make the intellectual abstractions involved, and the innate urge to communicate in a complex manner. And almost certainly, they belonged to a society that already possessed an elaborate system of interindividual communication: one that employed vocalization as well as gesture and body language. After all, as in the case of every behavioral innovation, the necessary physical springboard had to have been there. And with the Nicaraguan example to hand it is easy to envision—at least in principle—how, once a vocabulary had been created, feedback among the various brain centers involved would have allowed the children to structure their language and thought processes simultaneously. For them, what psychologists have taken to calling “private
speech” would have been a conduit to the conversion of intuitions into articulated notions that could then be manipulated symbolically.

An additional attractive feature of language as the stimulus for abstract thought is that, unlike theory of mind, it is a communal possession. For the same reason that a poker player keeps his cards to himself, it would on the face of it seem to be actively disadvantageous for an individual to reveal to others his or her ability to read or accurately guess their minds. And while this reality would not obviate the spread of that ability within the population if it were merely one more expression of a generalized intelligence, in this light it is hard to see theory of mind as in itself a driver of change. Of course, we are in total
terra incognita
here; and it may even be sheer speculation that language originated as a means of communication. (After all, in a typical human paradox, it is perhaps the greatest barrier to communication that there is in the world today.) It is conceivable that the functionally important role of language as an interior conduit to thought was paramount from the beginning. But language as a means of communication would most easily and rapidly have spread through a population that possessed the necessary biology—and ultimately beyond that small original population, throughout a biologically predisposed species whose newfound intellect soon allowed it to take over the world.

LANGUAGE, SYMBOLS, AND BRAINS

It would be much easier to speculate about what happened in that leap from nonsymbolic to symbolic if we had a better idea of how the human brain works: how it turns a mass of structured electrochemical signals into what we experience as our consciousnesses. Recently developed real-time techniques of imaging what happens in the brain (i.e., where it's using energy) while it undertakes different cognitive tasks have taught us a great deal. But just how our controlling organ puts everything together into what we subjectively think and feel is still largely unknown. And this renders problematic the task of identifying those specific brain areas whose modification at the origin of our species laid the groundwork for our new cognitive performance. Nonetheless, any differences we might be able to detect between human brains and those
of
our close relatives would certainly give us somewhere to begin. And since paleoneurologists are still hazy about what differences in external brain shape between fossil hominids and humans mean, the natural place to start this endeavor is with the brains of living apes. After all, we have a broad idea about what we can do that the apes can't—though it turns out that there are severe practical difficulties in getting an ape to do what you want inside a functional MRI machine. Which only serves to emphasize—yet again—the vastness of the cognitive gulf that separates us from them.