A Sneaky Theory of Where Language Came From

A Sneaky Theory of Where Language Came From: It might have hijacked our early ancestors’ brains.

Ben James

Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence of being human?” And he has proposed a provocative answer. In a paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves.

To understand what Kolodny’s getting at, I ask Bovaird to walk me through the history of Stone Age technologies. He starts by smashing an irregular, grapefruit-size stone between two larger rocks. He picks through the resulting fragments, looking for a shard with an excellent cutting edge. This is simple Oldowan technology, he tells me—the first stone tools, used by our hominin ancestors as far back as 2.5 million years ago.

Next, he flashes forward a million years to the technological revolutions of Homo ergaster. No longer did toolmakers simply knock stones together to see what they got; now they aimed for symmetry. Bovaird holds up his work in progress, a late Acheulean hand ax—the multi-tool of the middle-to-lower Paleolithic, good for cutting meat, digging dirt, smashing bone. The blade of this ax has a zigzag edge, with tiny, alternating flakes removed from each side of the cutting surface. To achieve this level of serration, Bovaird explains, he needs a precise understanding of how the stone works, as well as the ability to plan his work many steps in advance.

Somewhere on the timeline between the long run of the Oldowan and the more rapid rise of Acheulean technologies, language (or what’s often called protolanguage) likely made its first appearance...