Good evening everyone. Thanks so much for joining us tonight. My name is Serena Longo on behalf of Harvard bookstore, the
Harvard University Division of Science, the Cabot Science Library and Mass
Humanities. I'm so excited to welcome you to our program tonight with Daniel L.
Everett presenting his latest book "How Language Began: the Story of Humanity's
Greatest Invention. In just a moment I'll turn things over to Professor Melissa
Franklin who will be introducing the program tonight but first I'd like to
say a few words about the series and how you can learn more about our spring
season. The science book talk series features talks throughout the academic
year by authors of recently published science related literature. Just next
week we're very excited to welcome renowned physicist and Princeton
professor Paul J Steinhardt for his book "The Second Kind of Impossible" and in
April will be joined by biologist and best-selling author Neil Shubin for his
new book "Some Assembly Required." If you'd like to stay up to date on the series
and our newly posted talks we have a few options. Nearly all of our events are
filmed and recorded for the public. You can access them at the web address
science.fas.harvard.edu/booktalks which I've written here on the board and
also you can find out announcements about our spring line up at Harvard.com/science and lastly you can learn about Harvard Bookstore's many other non
science book talks which take place nearly every day in and around Harvard
Square by visiting us at Harvard.com and signing up for our weekly email
newsletter. Tonight's talk will be followed by some time for your questions
after which we'll have a book signing and refreshments in the Cabot Science
Library. If you haven't picked up one already we have copies of "How Language
Began" for sale at the back of the hall and in the Cabot library as well. And as
always a few thank-yous. Thanks to our partners here at Harvard who make this
series and of course the cheese all-important cheese possible at the
reception and thank you to all of you for being here
for purchasing books that support an independent bookstore and for affirming
that science matters. And finally just a quick reminder of course to silence your
cellphones before the talk begins. And so now I'm so pleased to bring up
Melissa Franklin, Harvard physics professor and the first woman ever to
receive tenure in the Harvard Physics Department. Hi. I'm really excited about this talk.
You know we have a lot of these science book talks but they're mostly physics
and I'm really excited to have something really we're branching out and I'm
very excited about tonight's talk and if you any of you have any ideas about more
talks on this subject I see people here I've never seen before so I think it's a
different audience than the physics talks maybe. Yes? Yes okay and so if
anybody has any ideas my name is Franklin at physics. Just ideas for
interesting books in your part of sciency things please let me
know. Okay I want to introduce Daniel Everett who has a really interesting
past and in particular he started his
education at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. I spent years in Chicago but
I've never seen the Moody Bible Institute. It's at Lasalle and West
Chicago Street. Nobody's from Chicago? Okay well anyway that's kind of an
interesting start and from there he went to Brazil and got his PhD at the
universe University of Campinas which is called Los Campos and he did his
research also in the South Amazon studying the Piraha in the Amazon basin
and now he taught at a lot of different places. He taught in Pittsburgh at
Manchester which I think is in England? Yeah not Manchester By The Sea and at
UNICAMP which is also in Brazil and has had many many interesting positions of
leadership. In the meantime he has written many books. The one I like the
best of course is "Dark Matter of the Mind" because I'm a physicist
and that's why initially I thought this would be a good talk in the in this
series. "Dark Matter of the Mind" you do know and even though you're linguists
you know what dark matter is. Yes. "Of the Mind in the Culturally Articulated
Unconscious. Another one I like is "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle" or Amazonian jungle. The one we're talking about today "How Language Began: the Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention and the one that's coming I'm also really excited about "American Aristotle: the
Life and Mind of Charles Sanders Peirce." There are other books so don't, you're
not gonna run out. I mean if you start now and you're under fifty you could get
there. There is a, just to say, there's a if you don't have this the length of
attention for books there's a fantastic New Yorker profile on Dr. Everett. So I'm very
excited because I hear that it's going to be exciting. Lots of really questions
which are probing and, right? Questions good and probing questions so I'm very
very very excited to welcome Daniel Everett. Okay. So I'll walk around a bit. I
come to Harvard now about once a week twice a week because I'm writing this
biography of Charles Sanders Peirce who graduated from Harvard in 1859
when he was going here as a student his home sat where Sever Hall currently
sits. Those of you who are familiar with Harvard Yard. And the person who designed that hall, HR Richardson, was a fellow student of Peirce's in the 1859 class. There were eight of them and Peirce wrote little summaries of each of them. Said Richardson wasn't very smart and he also talked about Strong Vincent a great
American civil war hero who died on in Gettysburg saying that he was a bit
flashy and also dull. Peirce thought everybody was dull but he was the first
summa cum laude in chemistry from Harvard and he was a geophysicist for 31
years for the US government. He was an astronomer at Harvard and is mainly
known as a mathematician, logician, and philosopher. So that's very different
from this work although you'll see that Peirce is implicated in the evolution of
human language so I want to thank several people and you can see their
names. So now we'll go to something else. Not that grateful. Language is a biocultural behavior so language is is a bio cultural complex
and and thus research into its origins is necessarily interdisciplinary and so
if you're an archaeologist you're not going to find out by yourself how
language came about and you're not going to do that if you're a linguist so it
requires a lot of people working together and and I started on this
project by myself but have been working quite a bit with archaeologists in
particular Larry Barham from the University of Liverpool whose specialty
is Homo erectus there are also a lot of different ideas about what language is
I'll tell you the right one in a bit but language requires to understand the
evolution of language we need some archaeology linguistics and field
research on contemporary languages semiotics that's where Purse comes in
comparative biology philosophy cognitive science paleo neuroscience neuroscience
evolutionary theory and genetics so it's it is quite a daunting task for anyone
to even try to summarize the research that's going on there so we could ask
the first question we might ask us what is language what is it that we think
evolved and one view is that language is a grammar as is a set of sentences to
arrive by a recursive grammar that's a very popular definition of it among
linguists and or the other idea and the one I'm going to urge upon you this
evening is that language is the transfer of information by symbols so there is no
firm cutoff between humans and other species humans are better at
communication by language than other species are but it's not something that
is found exclusively in humans but I'll try to make that clear who has language
well everything communicates if you follow purses work the entire universe
is a sign everything is communication minerals communicate the trees right now
we'll start communicating with the environment the shorter days and start
to grow their leaves back so everything communicates
but not everything has language only only humans really appear to have
language and and we talk about other species and we have to be very careful
about what we say about them relative to humans to get this right so
communication again is the transfer of information by signs which I'll make
clearer as we go along and language is the transfer of information by symbols
symbols that are open-ended and created by people well
they could be created by anybody but they just happen to be created by people
and so there are three types of signs that are very important to the story and
two of those are found throughout nature icons and indexes an icon is something
that resembles something else there's some sort of correspondence you know a
reflection in the water or of a certain kind of a feeling that you get that
corresponds to a particular musical event an index is a sign that's
connected physically to what it represents so smoke is connected
physically to fire it's an index of fire a footprint is an index of the creature
that made it symbols are signs that refer to objects by convention habit or
rule and I'm to simplify things I'm simply going to say that symbols are
conventional signs they are things that don't have to mean what they mean
there's no necessary connection to what they mean so dog refers to a canine in
English petrol in Spanish and cashew who and Portuguese kneel pie in pita ha
these are just conventional things they're just physical forms that take a
canoe that are conventional to refer to meanings that are significant in that
culture so the threshold the productive symbols was likely fairly sudden but the
evolution of the platforms for language and symbols took evolutionary time and
are not limited to Homo sapiens they don't just get a creature that one day
stands up and starts talking we expect to see a lot of correspondence and a lot
of continuing continuity between our species and other species when we look
at look at communication so we find that that birds have particular song dialects
depending on the geographical area they're found even in the same species
that dolphins communicate that chimpanzees and gorillas have have
fairly interesting communication systems they're not human language but they're
also not totally unlike human language one view is that language the view that
language is primarily a former grammar came about in our species and Homo
sapiens about 100,000 and 200,000 years ago the alternative view which I will
talk about tonight is that language has existed for about sixty thousand
generations or more than a million years in this so another thing to clarify is
that speech is secondary the the sounds that are coming out of my mouth are just
one way to express language it can be expressed by color coded shapes it can
be expressed by hand signals it can be expressed by mouth signals by sounds and
you don't need a lot of speech to have language after all think of the computer
how many speech sounds does a computer have individual things that it can
recognize well it has two one and zero and everything that can be said can be
said with ones and zeroes computers have better memories in some respects than we
do so they can remember long and distinguished longer sequences so we
tend to have more than just two symbols actually you could have just one symbol
and have a language you know right because you could have AA means tree and
aa means by the tree and ah means over there by the tree or
something like that but that's hard to remember so those systems don't tend to
do too well in fact I don't know of any languages like that the smallest system
that I'm aware of is pita ha which has 8 consonants if you're a man seven
consonants if you're a woman and three vowels and it also has two tones which
is something when we talk about the evolution of speech we sometimes forget
that there are tone languages and that people can distinguish words by tones
rather than just by consonants and vowels there's some evidence some people
that come to Fitch for example as a biologist at the University of Vienna
thinks that early species of humans had full speech capabilities in fact he
argues that non-human species have full speech capabilities the answer is it
doesn't really matter that much the because language is not about speech it
is about it is about symbols and transfer of information by symbols
however also if you talk about the the components of all languages so every
language in the world has the three vowels e uu and I tell you that pita ha
only has three vowels if you're a linguist you can guess that those vowels
are e hoo because every language has those vowels those are called the
quantal vowels they're just the easiest to hear there in fact they're so
important that according to Phil Lieberman whose son Daniel I believe
teaches here is has argued that that the entire evolution of the tongue in the
human mouth is to be able to produce those vowels they're that important and
they help distinguish the speech of all languages did they come later
well according to Fitch and others they didn't come later but according to work
by by Geoffrey lakelyn and Phil Lieberman but especially Geoffrey
Layton's work there is a rapid evolution in this in the vocal apparatus starting
about the time of Homo erectus which would be explained if that's when
language started they would need speak better speech to to communicate with
language although you don't have to make clear sounds to have language you can
have garbled speech and it's still language it's like getting a Model T
Ford is that a car yes it is it's not a Ferrari but it's a Model T so we didn't
start off necessarily with the full capabilities that we have today but but
we had enough speech to get by there are a lot of external conditions on on human
speech evolution so work by Damien Blasi and Sean Rogers and and Caleb Everett
who not not coincidentally shares my name all argue for XO centric factors
affecting the evolution of speech anyway our hero is Homo erectus I'm sure that
he or she looked just like this I was very I was very I'm always intrigued to
write to discover new findings in the literature
about the accomplishments of Homo erectus because we tend to really
downgrade Homo erectus you know if you remember if you're old enough to
remember the American comedian Ronde rodney dangerfield
you know his line is I don't get no respect that's how I feel about Homo
erectus at times everybody's impressed with the latest artwork from
Neanderthals or or sapiens but erectus is really where it all started and in
fact in recent study published there was there's been some news about it in the
last couple of days it was discovered that homo sapiens
modern Homo sapiens in Africa have DNA evidence that shows that they interbred
with a homo species that existed prior to the split of Neanderthals and sapiens
well that's Homo erectus they didn't mate with chimpanzees and gorillas as
far as we know they had to see a certain amount of similarity between themselves
and erectus almost certainly and and there would have done that Homo sapiens
and erectus coexisted for many years together in fact homo erectus is the
most successful species in the history of our genus Homo
so they existed from 1.8 million years ago to about a hundred and forty
thousand years ago some would say even more recently they're far more
successful than we are they existed well over a million years longer than homo
sapiens has existed their height was between 5/8 and 511 so they weren't
little australopithecines they were big guys they had you know big bones they
could have pretty much taken on any Homo sapiens walking around they were wide
ranging polymorphic species they had a lot of variation in skull size and in in
physical strength and they arguably did possess some modern vocal apparatus from
what we can tell from the it's very difficult to find the small little bones
that define a modern vocal apparatus but in
recent work there has been discoveries of what appear to be hyoid bones that
belonged to Homo erectus which would have meant that they had fairly modern
speech capabilities they were ocean travelers magnificent tool makers they
invented fire they started communities much of what we
take for granted as human accomplishments are human
accomplishments they're just from a non sapien species of human so they're our
gradualist versus saltation its views of language origins so did language come
about gradually or just pop in the beam I think it came about gradually just to
set the groundwork is language uniquely human or non unique human set of
abilities shared with other animals Descartes who was very good
mathematician but an extremely poor philosopher charles sanders purse in
fact has all sorts of sections about why Descartes was a bumbling idiot but of
course that Charles thought that about many people but he severely attacks all
of Cartesian philosophy but one of the one of the interesting distinctions of
course is that Kurt Descartes felt that only humans had cognition and that other
animals were basically meat machines they were just you know you didn't hate
me to be kind of animals to worry about them because they had no consciousness
they had no brains they had brains but no minds because
dualism comes from Descartes in modern times so there's a very different view
from Descartes this is the view that we are just continuous in nature humans are
just animals like others shouldn't be a shock for people these days although it
is a shock for many linguists to think in those terms so the evolution of the
brain how big was Homo erectus his brain and what does it matter
their average brain size was about nine hundred and fifty CCS whereas a
Neanderthals brain was about fourteen hundred CCS and a modern humans brain is
about twelve hundred and fifty to thirteen hundred CCS although many
modern European females have brains in the in
sighs range of homo-erectus about 950 CCS and as as people who study the brain
have come to realize size doesn't matter so much but you can find you can see the
ranges here the circle is where we find most of the Homo erectus brain sizes but
you also find some sapiens in there and Neanderthals and as you go out towards
the upper edges of the chart you do start to get into fairly sapiens
exclusive territory but just remembering that we don't fully understand the brain
that's putting it mildly and so then the main thing that matters
is the organization of the brain and that's extremely difficult to tell with
fossils how their brains were organized so human ancestry is is represented in
this chart with erectus at the bottom a maybe floresiensis who was from the
islands of Flores this sometimes called The Hobbit little creature who was over
there according to some linguists there are still stories about them told by the
by the indigenous peoples I don't think that's probably right but they do have
stories about little creatures running around through the the jungles but from
erectus came all the other creatures that are related to us all the other 20
or so species of Homo but erectus was the first now where does Charles Sanders
purse come in he was by the way banned from Harvard so it's really interesting
that his papers are here at Harvard then one has to come here to study purse
because Charles Eliot who was president at the time didn't want him on campus
because he was he was seen coming out of a hotel with a woman who wasn't his wife
so he would lost his job at at Johns Hopkins University and that was the only
job he ever had in academics and he was banned from the Harvard campus even
though his brother was the Dean of mathematics and his father had been
professor of mathematics for 50 years here anyway
so he was the one who invented for the very first time first of first and
second order logic that's creditors often good to given to
godlet Frigga but in fact purse had it worked out in some ways before Fraga and
independently about the same time he invented semiotics the theory of signs
before so sewer he invented pragmatism from William James there's actually an
interesting correspondence between purse and James purse was a member of the
National Academy of Sciences and he was explaining to James when he could not
nominate him for membership in the National Academy of Sciences because
most scientists took James he said we consider you a literary man not a real
scientist so but James got famous for the idea of pragmatism although the idea
comes from purse at that time that he was alive he was considered America's
greatest mathematician the German mathematician Ernest Schroeder wrote him
and said that your genius and your reputation shall shine like the Sun for
eons into the future which clearly was wrong but but he was a brilliant
mathematician he made fundamental discoveries in mathematics he was the
first person to link the the absolute length of a meter to a wavelength of
light from measurements he took over 20 different places in the globe he his
only book he ever wrote was on the physical properties of light photometric
researches and and he's the first person to notice that the milky way rotated all
sorts of things he did in his spare time and as I will argue in in the biography
about Percy was the inventor of cognitive science as we know it sort of
as we know it today anyway this is Perce as a young man here he was interesting
guy I'm gonna skip this and go on to culture because culture really is the
important thing here you can't have a language unless you have a culture and
you can't have a language a culture unless you have a language their
symbiotic symbiotically related each determines or constraints and leads to
the conditions to develop the other so in my definition culture is an abstract
network shaping and connecting social roles hierarchically structured
knowledge domains and ranked values so rank values are very important to
culture so it's not enough to know that people have the same values so for
example if you're French you might think that good food is very important and
that being in good shape is also very important and if you're from say Houston
Texas you may believe the same things but if you think that good food is more
important than being in shape you'll look one way and if you think
that being in shape is more important than good food
you'll look another way so the value rankings are as important or more
important than the actual values themselves culture is always shifting so
universal grammar is a very popular term it was made popular in modern times by
Noam Chomsky although the term goes back to the 12th century grammarians known as
the motifs tie and in the US the first person to ever talk about universal
grammar was Charles Sanders purse his view of grammar was both he and Chomsky
interestingly enough felt that recursion I can talk about recursion separately
but anyway they thought that recursion was the basis of grammar of grammar but
for Purse it was meaning recursive meanings not forms not the sentences but
the way that so for example if I say Bachelor I have to interpret that in
terms of say unmarried man and I interpret unmarried in terms of other
symbols and I interpret man in terms of other symbols so that every symbol
starts us to a recursive chain that has no end we everything is connected and to
understand one thing we have to understand a great deal of culture so
the the difference is for Purse universal grammar followed from logical
principles there was nothing necessarily genetic about it it simply followed from
logical principles if you had symbols they were subject to certain logical
constraints and those would affect the form of the language whereas the second
version of universal grammar Chomsky's is that not only is is human biology
responsible for under human linguistic capacity but the genes
are severe are specific genes linked to language so those are very different
views of universal grammar so now let's move on to tools tools turn out to be a
very important part of reasoning about the origins of human language the tools
are individual devices or processes that meet perceived needs of individuals and
communities or a set of devices processes and expertise used to harness
the properties of a particular material full culturally constructed repertoire
of knowledge conventions devices and processes values are vital at each stage
so tools are really complicated this is clearly a complicated tool but so is a
shovel a shovel has a specific kind of function and it's got you know if you
make a shovel out of out of rubber it won't work very well there's a whole lot
of things that have to go into a into as tool as simple as a shovel or a knife to
make it be what it is and it starts to take on meaning features that go beyond
its function human technology in meshes the material with the ideational we have
ideas and we and they're manifested materially tools involves social
constructivism tools become symbols as they emerge from the values knowledge
structures and social roles of a particular culture symbolism and erectus
tools is therefore crucial evidence so that's what one thing we really need to
look for in addition to the other accomplishments of erectus now it's true
that other species have tools but other species tools tend to be opportunistic
and one of the interesting things for example about erectus is that they took
very good care of their tools they colored their tools they carried their
tools with them over long distances they planned ahead no other species is known
to do that although it's a good Darwinian I
wouldn't want to say that no other species could you know I wouldn't want
to predict what no other species could do because every time somebody tries to
do that we find that they can learning of technical skills takes place
using a combination of language gesture imitation and guided intervention this
applies to all erectus and Neanderthals instance and sapiens tools and we'll be
getting to that this is partially based on lab experiments with stone tool users
and my experience in the Amazon I see this too so so it's at the mini
archaeology departments they have napping labs k in AP P naught n AP and
and they they learn to make stone tools graduate students learn to make stone
tools and they brew they bruise their hands they cut their hands it's it's
really hard so the simplest form of stone tool is like the Oldowan tools
which will see a picture of those takes several huppah love hundred hours very
often for students PhD students to learn to make accurately when we get into the
more complex tools it takes even you know a lot longer and what people have
found in these labs is that even the simplest tools it's very hard to simply
show by example how to do it language tends to be implicated in in
this in the skill acquisition now this could simply be because their sapiens
right and sapiens talk so why not avail yourself of the speech that that you
have in the amazon i have watched many men teach their sons how to make tools
like blow guns and bows and arrows and a lot of the time is in silence but then
you will often hear a question and an answer about something that was very
difficult to see or a movement that was very quick so tools take explanation and
in many cases so once again on a sign a sign refers to an object so if I have a
sign if I say water that's the object and the representation is wate R and the
interpretation that you're going to make is something to drink
so icons their physical resemblance correspondence they don't tend to have
much intentionality about them a reflection in the water is there whether
you intended it to be there or not but they can last after someone's not
there so the smell of or a footprint can last for quite a while all animals are
able to interpret indexes in fact when we talk about animals interpretation
abilities almost all the time in the experiments when they're talking about
amble animals learning symbols in the personal sense they're not learning
symbols they're learning indexes and icons which are very different levels of
cognitive accomplishment from symbols and so symbols are the final ones and
these are the properties that are important for us no symbols no language
they involve displacement the thing that we're talking about doesn't actually
have to be there I can say water and hold this up or I can say water without
it there and you still know what I'm talking about that the object doesn't
actually have to be there indexes lasts a long time these footprints are about
3.7 million years old found by Mary Leakey in there called the late holey
footprints and if you follow them out you can see that it's a large
Australopithecus probably authority' thickest walking with a small one and
they walk and they turn and look at something and then they walk on and it
rained after they had walked by and this is volcanic ash that hardened like
concrete and left their footprints there this is Australopithecus africanus and
as far as we can tell they're the first creature to ever preserve an icon so
they're starting to look at things and contemplate I don't think that's too
strong a word contemplate the similarities so this stone which is
about three million years old is called the maka pons got pebble it's was found
in a cave in South Africa and it's unlike the material that the other
stones in the cave was we're from and if you look at it it has a interesting
characteristic it looks like a smiley face and and this thing is about three
inches by two inches so it's too big to have gotten caught between their toes
and carried up there coincidentally this seems to be something that
Australopithecus and Australopithecus found interesting and carried up to the
with no particular functional role other than it looked like a looked like a face
australopithecines also made tools their tools about 3.3 million years old found
in different places or the Oldowan tools discovered largely by initially by the
Leakey family icons are all over the place in addition to seeing icons in
nature we have them in churches and here are tools that have been actually made
into icons and symbols both and from symbols to grammar so there how complex
does a grammar have to be everybody will agree every every linguist will agree
that you can't have a language until you have a grammar but how complex does the
grammar have to be well there are there are a couple of different possibilities
and one of the points that I make in the book is that we find all of these in the
world today so one we could call a g1 grammar which is just words put in a
linear order and that seems to be the case for example in Peter ha and Rio
which is a language of New Guinea which is John saw Mary so there's no other
structure let's say in a language like this there's just those three words John
saw Mary a G 2 grammar would be like a G 1 grammar but have additional hierarchy
or structure into the phrases so the man you saw yesterday is here where you saw
yesterday as a sentence hierarchically located inside a larger sentence or you
could simply say the very big ball roll down the hill
there you start to get more structure it's not simply linear order of words a
G 3 grammar has both recursion and hierarchy so what is recursion it's the
ability to put one thing inside another of the same type and just keep doing it
so the the man who is here said that bill said that Mary said that Peter said
John bought a house when you start to get structures like that so that you can
say there's no longer sentence and a language then recursion is the best way
to handle that a recursion is communicatively very useful you can pack
a lot more information in a sentence with recursion but I've argued that
although recursion can be found in any language it's not a necessary component
of all languages and in fact there are good reasons why some languages would
avoid it so erectus had icons we know that they carry things around they
didn't carry around small smiley faces that we know of but they did carry
around phallic symbols like this cuttlefish bone that was found in
Morocco about 450,000 years ago and erectus also started making quite
complex tools so there there are three grades of tools in the Paleolithic
especially in the lower Paleolithic there are old of on tools about 3
million years ago there are Chilean tools made as recently as two hundred
thousand years ago and then finally there are level wattles which are the
most complex tools found in the Paleolithic so these are refined which
means they've been thin these take it quite a bit of effort and skill to
function and they have various parts to them you don't just start off banging
two rocks together to get one of those you have to have a plan there are
certain things that have to be cut out of the tool it has to have a certain
shape to be functional so when erectus started working on tools they might
start with a large piece of rock and out of that they had to break out the pieces
that they needed to get the kind of functional tool and they make them all
pretty much the same to work for them erectus was the first to come up with a
controlled use of fire the pre shaping of stone tools working them before they
actually started chiseling out the tools they used wood and bone tools as well
and we think they might have also used half the tools and half the tools are
quite important because that's when you tie a handle on that shows a lot of
functional improvement over others and it shows a lot of foresight and planning
so these tools had had a great deal of complexity over hundreds of thousands of
years and in recent research in modern-day Ghana
Larry Barham has discovered about 900 thousand year old tools that seemed to
have been dyed with ochre that's a significant finding because dyeing tools
shows that they had that's um not simply a functional aspect of tool making that
is a that is an aspect of tool making that shows thought that goes above the
mere function of the tool hafting tools combinatory thinking imagining the
future and likely invented by erectus it's one of the most significant
technological breakthroughs in human tool making and ochre is also very
important and we see things like hand axes they had they had a tool kit not
not nearly as extensive as the Neanderthal tool kit or as a homo
sapiens tool kit but it's an extensive tool kit they had hand axes and cleavers
they had pics and so we see different stages we should recall the simple stage
of Oldowan tools that we saw that australopith estrella Pittacus had we
see our Chilean tools these are already starting to get refined and showing a
lot more work and then we get to the the Cadillac of the the tools of erectus
levallois tools not everyone agrees that erectus made levallois tools they're
dated some are dated as as early as six hundred and twenty-five thousand BC but
not everyone agrees with those dates the dates that do have the widest agreement
are about three hundred thousand years ago that would apply that would mean
that they could have been used by Neanderthals or sapiens or erectus so
it's difficult to limit them exclusively to erectus however a million years ago
we see larger tools that are made with the same way that levallois tools
are made levallois tools require a lot of hammer work before the final stage
which is lifting the core out of the larger tool and that takes a lot of
planning a lot of discussion or a lot of skill and and many of the people who
study the tools a fairly wide consensus is that levallois tools can't be learned
by imitation alone there has to be linguistic instruction when we get to
this level of tool complexity and these tools were in fact found as early as a
million years ago tools that were made by the same process not everyone would
call them by the same name but they were made by the same process so every tool
that was made had to have various functional features so if we can if we
find tools that have nothing but functional features it's difficult to
see anything symbolic in that we can say of any tool that it's an index of the
tasks to be performed it's an icon of other tools you have one tool as a model
to make another tool so it does represent a growth in in in significant
but to get to the level of symbols we need to see things that aren't simply
part of the function and we start to see some of this at the end of the Chilean
age we see tools that are made a little bit more elaborately than they need to
be made they're painted they're died and and in fact when Larry and I were
working on some tools that he had just brought back from Africa this this past
summer another expert on erectus tools walked into his lab that at Liverpool
and said oh those are from East Africa because apparently East African and West
African erectus designed their tools in different ways so that the design of the
tools was representative of the group that they came from they indicated
robustness you know one of the earliest ideas when they started to find these
non-functional aspects of erectus tools was that
it was men showing off for women making the tools to show that they were better
tool makers but of course we have no idea whether it was men who made the
tools or women who made the tools so we don't know there was somebody was
probably showing off but we don't know who it was showing off but then we find
really interesting things about erectus that are difficult to explain and we
find that you know so this shell is 750,000 years old and the markings on
this shell were done in Java by a Homo erectus using a shark tooth on on this
large show and the marks were made without ever picking up the shark tooth
their constant continuous representation and we start to see a lot of this kind
of thing with erectus this kind of attempt to represent things such as this
rock we find these geometric shapes that erectus is starting to carve into shells
and into tools so that we realize that erectus is starting to see things beyond
their their mere functionality and then about 250,000 years ago we find this
venus of Barakat ROM which is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem which is got
red ochre on it partially formed by humans partially formed by nature but
it's the first real artwork that we know about there others about the same time
and it does seem to have been made by erectus so erectus tools they they have
symbolic and social components they go beyond the functionally necessary they
go into style that represent one tradition over another they're beyond
icons and indexes they're simultaneously indexes of tasks icons of other tools
and symbols of the values and labor of the community symbols in linear order
simply turn out to be language as soon as you can start symbolizing things you
have the ingredients that are necessary for language so if they had language
what other things did they do that might have shown that they had language so the
tools show us that they had the ability to symbolize and and and this would have
been a cognitive breakthrough for language but
is there any other evidence well it turns out that there are but let's talk
about how you get to Modern Languages from just a few symbols
most things are enhancements so we add things so you have language systems that
decide what they're going to represent what is it that you want to talk about
so among the peat aha for example there are no numbers there are no color words
they don't have the number one does this mean that they're cognitively deficient
well they also don't have golf clubs there are a lot of things they don't
have and a lot of things we don't have how many men in here know how to make a
good bow and arrow there they they produce what their culture needs their
culture doesn't need numbers they don't have numbers and this has been verified
with a lot of experiments over the years so they also don't represent tents but
they do represent so they don't have past tense or present tense or future
tense but they have a lot of ways of distinguishing different perspectives on
how an action takes place whether it took place at a certain height whether
it took place near the river so they build into their verbs
how many verb forms does a does English have right it's pretty poor five seeing
saying some singing sings that's it you've exhausted the entire word grammar
of English with those but if you go on to Spanish or Portuguese you'll get 30
to 50 types of verbs but in Pete aha since there are 16 suffixes possible you
have 2 to the 16 possible verb forms which is about 65,000 verb forms so
their grammar is not like ours it has very complex verbs but simple in other
ways compared to us it's what a culture decides to represent
that starts to work its way into the language conceptual systems how do we
interpret these things do we interpret these things strictly based on the
symbols we see to interpret them based on other cultural nuances and these all
start to form part of the language and enter the language in different ways
linguistic systems will have different rules different structures different
constraints so this show that language has at least three these
major components the objects the ways they're interpreted and the forms that
we choose to represent them in and languages differ a lot so if I say
yesterday what did John give to Mary in the library
there's intonation my pitch is modulated to depending on whether it's a question
or a statement and and these are add-ons to make things clearer it's not
necessary to have this intuition intuition to distinguish questions from
statements but it is very very useful in Pete aha that like many of the world's
languages are probably close to half of the world's languages such as Chinese
and Korean and others the language is tonal so the word for ear in Pete aha
is away and the word for foreigner is away and the word for skin is away and
the word for Brazil nut shell is away and the word for hand is alwey so if I
whistled it and those are all very important in Peter house so you've got
to be able to hear those tonal distinctions but obviously tones not
necessary because we don't have it in English and although English may not be
as attractive sounding as Peter Han it still seems to work so we there are all
sorts of things we can add once we get symbols there are all ways that we can
embellish them with with sound structures and the kinds of syllables we
use the way we organize things and then we we start to think about how language
is represented in the brain and in the work of Evelina federico at MIT x' brain
and cognitive sciences department she's found that language is not at all found
in just one part of the brain as people thought for many years but that it's
distributed throughout the brain and what she calls a language Network and
that this network is fairly similar for and across all languages and across all
people but it's a lot more complicated than simply saying it's in Broca's area
we've heard of that area or Verna Keyes area actually the interesting thing
about Brokaw's patient is the part of his brain that was damaged was not
Broca's area but simplistic views of where language is
found in the brain are being challenged every day by more research so there are
various ways that we enhance grammar in you know morphemes are little parts of
words like the 65,000 Peter ha word forms there are phrases sentences
paragraphs discourses conversations all of these are important and they're found
and they occur naturally over time the interesting thing about languages though
its although it's very complicated once we start to look at a Finnish system we
can see that its components are relatively simple and build up over time
and that the core component to every aspect of the language that's been built
up is the symbol so what else did erectus do well by just under 2 million
years ago they were spread out across the world that we find them in Beijing
we find them in Iran we find them in in various parts of the world we find the
erectus there were still many in Africa and so they were traveling and we find
seven hundred and ninety thousand year old settlement in Israel
yes urban oh yeah Cove and in there we find the controlled use of fire
specialized spaces various components that that show for example separate
areas of the settlement are used for processing meat processing fish
processing plant what seemed to be communal areas so erectus did seem to
have a fairly the ability to have an organized society there's evidence that
their society was organized and this is found and from this in this ongoing work
in Israel and other places this is found at where the black dot is is an erectus
settlement in Israel there are a lot of interesting archaic human sites in the
Middle East and Israel and other places because if you're coming out of Africa
at the time they were coming out because the Sahara Desert was actually a lush
green forest you come out turn right and you know it's all you can do you can't
go straight because that's the ocean turn right and you're in
the middle-east and that's why we find those to be some of the earliest
settlement so here's the excavation that and Israel finding these different
aspects of it there's also good evidence that erectus traveled across distances
they could not see across in the ocean and there are several interesting things
to draw from this first of all most marine archaeologists argued that you
can't have a viable human community without 20 to 40 people arriving roughly
at the same time in an area so when we find evidence of viable human culture in
places like Flores and Indonesia so if you if you look at the island of Flores
and Indonesia the point where erectus would have had to cross is about 28
miles so it's about the size of the English Channel you could think well you
know people swim the English Channel and and we know that other animals could
swim across but Flores is is split off from the rest
of you know what would have been at that time the mainland by the strongest ocean
current in the world it's called the Pacific through flow and it was the same
current back then 750,000 years ago as far as we can tell so it was too
difficult for a human to swim across that current in fact if you just put a
raft in the water or just put a log in the water and and start off you're gonna
get washed out to sea you're not going to make it to Flores the current is too
strong so for humans who have gotten there it's highly likely that they had
boatbuilding capability in fact an archaeologist in in Australia Robert
Bednarik has built boats using erectus tools a Chilean tools and levallois
tools and and shown that he can build boats that can get to get there in that
period of time the question is could they have done that without language and
there's an article by a Max Planck evolutionary anthropologist David Gill
called how much grammar do you need to build a boat
and a and he argues that you actually don't need much grammar but you do need
language to be able to build a boat and so the idea that they could sail and
this is a controversial idea most things said about the past or controversial
because you can say they got there and they had to get there in a certain
number but you can't show that they got several places the ideal thing would be
to show them in places where we so some people have argued they got across by
tsunamis right but that sort of defies the physics of tsunamis which tend to
come towards the land now there are cases of people who've been found out to
sea there was a Japanese guy found floating on a roof I think after the
tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago so it does occasionally happen but
it doesn't seem to be a very productive way of travel you know sort of
fortuitous and they did this a lot even in places where we don't know of
tsunamis having hit so contra the Russian archaeological team found
evidence of in socotra 1.4 million years ago which is a hundred and fifty miles
from the closest land we start to see evidence of potential burial this stone
on the right is called Excalibur it's a colored hand axe of the period Julian
hand axe and it was found in a grave does that mean it was buried on purpose
with him we start to see evidence of that it's difficult to say convincingly
that it was but it is interesting that it was a colored hand axe found around
the time that Neanderthal was starting to appear the the erectus Neanderthal
transition period and we find wooden Spears that were preserved for almost
four hundred thousand years according to some dating which would have put them
back in the time of of erectus so erectus about 1.5 million years ago they
start making extremely complicated tools they start travelling around the world
they start an evolutionary process physical where they start to get more
articulate speech that capacity for more articulate speech they seem to be
mastering boat travel the ocean was never
barrier to erectus anytime there's an ocean barrier you can expect to find
erectus on the other side they had organized settlements so all of these
tasks imply the likelihood of language if we look at other species and we see
species that are far removed from humans that seem to approximate some sort of
linguistic ability it's it's hardly surprising that we would see an even
greater ability in these creatures that were so much like us and had almost
modern sized brains so if it's correct there is evidence for language nobody
could say this case has been proven but it is highly likely once we take off the
burden of languages looking like modern languages and we realize that a language
is the transfer of information by the discovery and use of symbols and
elaboration of those symbols over time then we see a gradual evolution of
language and we see evidence of erectus and no reason to withhold the judgment
that they had language to account for all the different things that that they
were able to accomplish in their long history they were preceded by these guys
these are just a variety the the various species of australopithecines Nature
experimented a lot before it got to us you know that could mean that we're the
best or it could mean that you know it doesn't necessarily mean that were the
best and when we ask where erectus went just look around
we are erectus we erectus was the was the antecessor ancestor of Neanderthal
of sapiens of every other human creature that has existed they were the smartest
creatures the world had ever seen they were the most widely traveled they
sailed they built fire they had settlements they had the strong evidence
for symbolism in their tools it's very difficult to see why we would withhold
the judgment that they likely had language and what they had to have had
was more than simply grunts and squeals they had to have
something that was able to communicate actual content about the world around
them the kind of thing that would have been
essential and been discovered in symbols so thank you very much we have time for a few questions if
anyone wants to raise their hand I can run this hello thank you for a nice talk
to my knowledge what is peculiar to homosapians is the use of actual what we
would today call artwork such as was seen of course in the stone caves in
France and perhaps in Africa earlier your talk is the first I've heard where
you can say that Homo erectus was actually doing dude I would I don't know
if you call it art or not of course today we still don't know if everything
what is heart and what it's not but that's another matter but that is one
thing that seems to have been killed but even that occurred relatively late in
the lifetime of Homo sapiens also I'd be interested to know if you think homo
erectus now don't we have learned how to use fire but I'd actually learned how to
make it so thank you yeah on fire the archeological evidence seems to be that
yes they could make it they had controlled use of fire we find it
regularly in their settlements as far as artwork this is a a red herring that a
lot of archaeologists have have thought to be somewhat important because we
think of art as symbolic actually some artists symbolic but a lot of art
especially representational art is simply iconic it's a lower level of
cognitive development than symbolism so art is is a wonderful accomplishment but
it's not crucial to the linguistic line it's it's a sort of red herring to think
that if we find painting it's almost certain that if we find painting they
could talk but it's there's no argument from that to that if we don't find
painting they couldn't talk painting is just a development cultures develop over
time and I know of many cultures that I've done research on in the Amazon that
have no art but they certainly can talk you know I mean we I mean you could
there's there's they don't do anything that is is more elaborate in some ways
than homo erectus did Homo erectus was a hunter-gatherer band and and so we find
many cultures today that live fairly similarly I'm you know they're a lot
smarter they have bigger brains they can they can think of other things but and
if you take them out of the hunter-gatherer band and raise them in a
city they'll be unrecognizable for anybody else who was raised in the city
which I doubt would be the case for Homo erectus but at the same time art doesn't
we want to say that art represents language because it's complicated
cultural accomplishment and it is it can be symbolic but it's often simply iconic
so art seems to be a separate cultural development that is off the line of
language evolution and and I don't find it convincing to say that art is either
here nor there when it comes to the to it language evolution testing okay what
how would you describe the limitations of their language of erectus yes so I
work with languages that have similar properties I mean so in other words if
you think about what the simplest grammar could be just words in a linear
order I've worked with languages like that and the fact is they can say
anything we can say the complicated grammars that we have have very useful
communicative functions but they are not necessary to express modern thought or
complicated thought so the fact that somebody is we can say they have a a
simple grammar doesn't mean they have simple thought it's that's another thing
that that has happened in the history of anthropology and linguistics to somehow
think that language is the mirror of thought and it doesn't have to be there
are a lot of things you know for example I work with hundred rupees that have
very few words for time does this mean they don't know there was yesterday
so the pita ha for example have no word for yesterday and no word for tomorrow
and we often find that this or that culture doesn't have a word for X and so
we drive we drive all kinds of conclusions from it but I don't see any
conclusions to draw from that they can think about those things everybody knows
they got up yesterday and they're getting up today and they'll probably
get up tomorrow but the fact that they choose not to talk about them as a
separate kind of cultural value so I don't find the simplicity of grammar
connected very tightly to the complexity of thought yeah they could have said
yeah there we if they had symbols we it's it's they probably didn't have many
limitations I mean you could say maybe they had the intelligence of an
eight-year-old or a ten-year-old sapience child no way to really know
that but let's say they did eight-year-olds can talk a lot I'm
curious if we know how or how easy or difficult it is to know whether a tool
that they used was made was made by them and not created by nature or how we
discern well it's always very hard when you're going back in time to have dating
methods that can can link them to a species so if you find a tool that six
hundred thousand years old they were the only ones around so nobody else was
around so they made it but if you find a tool that was a hundred and fifty
thousand years old well there were a lot of species of
humans around at that time so narrowing it down to Homo erectus becomes more
difficult but you can tell based you can guess based on the settlement patterns
but it's difficult to tell with precision once you start getting into
the area where other homo species were existing side by side oh that it was
made some of the older on tools could have just you know to one rock fell on
another and suddenly you get this but these at Julian tools these more complex
tools there's no way they came about by accident
they had to have been designed planned and and constructed with a great deal of
craftsmanship takes hundreds of hours at least 500
hours for from what I've heard for a graduate student in archaeology's to be
able to make a naturally in hand x2 not to make its how long it takes to learn
it they can make them faster after that I'm curious to know like what led to the
I guess eventual demise of this species like given your talk like how successful
they have been at traveling and establishing communities all around the
world so I'm just curious like what led to like a global and too successful run
yeah it's a very good question we're the only ones left standing so did they die
out did they become us you know one answer is they they didn't die that we
are them the other answer is that Homo sapiens has you know they're smarter and
they're they one thing we've shown as a species throughout our history is the
ability to to slaughter other people that look like us so the fact that the
Homo sapiens might have killed them all doesn't seem to have that doesn't seem
to be totally outside the realm of possibility either so I don't know why
they disappeared and I was asked I was asked a similar question when I was
giving a talk in Hungary and I probably should have been more careful but I said
you know the Hungarian Jews didn't disappear because they didn't have
language so there are all kinds of reasons that people disappear I am you briefly said at the beginning
that the homo erectus you found there was one that they found a hyoid bone in
it so yeah you're you're speculating that you know then they have vocal cords
and they could they could then you know produce sounds I mean so are you
thinking the the later species all had the hyoid bones and could vocalize we
don't really know some people to come so Fitch would believe that we almost
certainly had Homo erectus had this modern speech capability my point is
that it really doesn't matter evolving modern speech is a tremendous advantage
but it's not a necessary condition nor is it a sufficient condition for having
language we can look at other species that seem to have we listen to a parrot
they can produce human speech sounds fairly well that's so it shows that it's
not a sufficient condition for language and the fact that erectus might not have
had it would show that it's not a necessary condition for language because
we have deaf people today who talk with American sign language and say anything
we can say so language is looking for a physical medium to be transmitted and
that usually and most efficiently is human speech and with quantal vowels and
modern speech we can communicate much more clearly but it's neither necessary
nor sufficient to have language they could have produced sounds they might
not have been very clear but the reason that chimpanzees don't talk is not
because they can't produce sounds they produce enough sounds as my point what
about computers is that any creature that can produce two sounds could talk
in principle my dog makes a lot of sounds and I understand a lot of them
I'm trying to figure out if any of them are symbols but they're certainly she's
very articulate and letting me know when it's time to do certain things so I have
mastered a repertoire of her sounds and and she uses them but that doesn't mean
that she you know I don't expect her to give me advice about you know how to
find my grandmother and in ancestry.com or something like that you know these
are cultural accomplishments that require a much greater set of symbols in
command is about all we have time for give another hand to Danielle Everett
thanks everybody you
