Daniel Everett, How Language Began: The History of Humanity’s Greatest Invention [reupload]

yeah hey guys like Festa cooper-nichol ma I Kappa him a bit quick I checked Kappa gacaca Kai Bai copernica Akio so that means the Copernicus festival is very nice other festivals are not so nice and I learn a lot at the Copernicus festival thank you very much it's wonderful to be here with you it's quite an honor to be in Cracow I have been in Poznan twice over the last couple of years and it's always a joy to come to Poland I feel like I should do some field research here and learn some of the language which I haven't yet had an opportunity to do so tonight if you want to take one message away from this talk it's that language according to my theory and I think it's right or I wouldn't tell you is 1.5 million years old at least and began with Homo erectus so that's what we're going to talk about mainly about homo erectus language is a bio cultural behavior it is partly biological partly cultural it is it engages the entire human being we learn languages not just with our mouths or our brains but with our entire our entire body so language engages all of us and it emerges from our rich history as a species so what evidence would we have to appeal to to be able to talk about the origins of language well in fact although there are no fossilized words there are plenty of sources of evidence to construct an understanding of the origin of language so we have archaeology and a lot of the talk tonight will be about archeology we will talk about linguistics field research is another source semiotics this theory of signs comparative biology philosophy cognitive science paleo neuroscience neuroscience evolutionary theory and genetics we're not going to talk about all that tonight we're going to focus primarily on archeology and linguistics so to begin a discussion of how language evolved we need to start with what language is there are two principle two alternative perspectives on what language is one defines language in terms of grammar so that it's a set of sentences described by a recursive grammar another definition of language the one I will assume here is the transfer of information by symbols so in my perspective the crucial difference between human communication and animal communication is the use of symbols all entities in the world communicate arguably even a thermostat on the wall so if you set the therm the temperature on your thermostat to 18 degrees and it gets information from the environment that it is not at 18 degrees it will respond and bring the temperature down to 18 degrees so just about everything in the world communicates but only humans have language and once again the reason for that is just about everything in the world can in can interpret some signs but only humans can interpret and invent mainly invent symbols so I'll define communication as the transfer of information by signs and language as the transfer of information by symbols the types of signs that we're going to be assuming for this is an index which is any sign that is connected to what it refers to physically so a footprint a smell pointing your finger these are physical connections to the things that they represent an icon is something that looks like what it's going to represent it could be a blueprint a diagram a picture painting these are all iconic the the sculptures by Henry Moore out front are iconic and then a symbol is a sign that picks out something some meaning by cultural agreement so in English a dog refers to canine because in effect English speakers have agreed that's what we're going to call that and that's what makes a symbol different from icons and indexes the threshold to symbols was this gradual or sudden there are some linguists and some people who've written on on language appearance who have argued that it's very sudden that it appeared not only with our species but not even at the beginning of our species but it that it's only a hundred to 150 thousand years old some even say fifty thousand years old my perspective is much more Darwinian so I believe that we find the vestiges or the beginning aspects of language and many other species so my view is that language is one point five million to two million years old and I'll try to give you some evidence that that's the case so I think language has been found on earth for at least 60,000 generations when Homo neanderthalensis was born they were born into a linguistic world when our species originated people were already talking speech is secondary many people want to know what kinds of sounds early humans could make there's a there's a division of opinion on that there are some who believe that early humans couldn't make the full range of sounds that we can make today there are others who think they probably could make the full range of sounds but my point is that it's irrelevant whether they could make the full range of sounds or not because you don't need the full range of modern human sounds to have language for example how many sounds does a computer have it has only two zero and one it has only two ways to get across its information and with 0 and 1 it can communicate anything of course computers have large memories so more sounds you have the less memory is required but the Pita ha language that I work with has only 13 sounds if you're a man and 12 sounds if you're a woman it has seven consonants for women 8 consonants for men three vowels for both and two tones and with that you're able to communicate in fact the tones are important because many over a thousand languages in the world use tones to communicate like Chinese and Vietnamese and peeta ha and if you have tones the consonants and vowels become even less important so what speech capacity Homo erectus had is almost not entirely but almost irrelevant to whether or not it had language and this is our hero recently my wife and I did DNA tests to see where we come from and you'll be shocked to know that my DNA is 97% northern European and my wife's is the same you sort of look at us and you you get that idea but ultimately all of our DNA actually we did DNA tests of our dog's - which was even more fun but all of us go back to Homo erectus so some people say if homo erectus had language why did they disappear well they lasted a lot longer than we have lasted so far and in one sense we are them so they became us so they haven't disappeared homo erectus lived from almost two million years ago to a hundred and forty thousand some say sixty thousand years ago so that's a long period of time we've only been on the planet for about three hundred thousand years they stood about five foot eight to five foot eleven so that's like once meter 75 - to 1 meter 80 or something like that average height so they were they were tall on average they had brains of about 950 cc's our brains are about thirteen hundred CCS although some European women's average brain size is 950 CCS which simply shows you that the the brain doesn't indicate intelligence it's only one of the factors so their brain size was in our range they were found all over the world and they had different forms they varied quite a bit all over the world just like we do just like you can find many varieties of sapiens you could find many varieties of Homo erectus so again there are always opposing views that we've talked about here and the main thing to get across is that the view there's one view that is non Darwinian that language came about very suddenly and the other view that language came about through Darwinian evolution which means that it came about gradually and we should be able to find signs of it and other species and if we look at the evolution of the brain we find that in this middle part here drawn with a circle we find overlap between Neanderthals which actually had bigger brains than ours they had brains of about fourteen hundred and fifty CCS but we find much overlap between Homo erectus Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens there were many other proposed species of the genus Homo but I'm only going to talk about these three because these are the three were most certain about and this is the most recent or one of the most recent models of human ancestry where we came from so you can see that erectus led to all kinds of other creatures and we are one of them that erectus led to Neanderthals erectus came into sapiens so in a sense we are all the descendants of Homo erectus so when you do your DNA tests and it tells you your families from Africa that's not a surprise we are all from Africa nineteenth century philosopher charles sanders purse who i am writing a biography now of was one of the most I think the most brilliant person to ever come out of the United States and he made contributions in a variety of areas but the area we want to talk about tonight is his theory of signs what is called semiotics and in semiotics there's there's a picture of he was despised he was fired from the only job he ever had at a university and lived his life in poverty but felt it was his duty to write daily so when he died a hundred and forty thousand pages of brilliant work was discovered and it was discovered that he invented logic before Fraga he invented he was the first person to measure the wavelength of light and relate it to the meter so the meter is roughly corresponds to wavelength of light that's owed to purse many other discoveries the first person to find that the milky way rotated and then some ideas of mine that are important one that I call dark matter of the mind we know lots of things we do not know we know we learn these things by daily experience by interacting with others and when that dark matter of the mine overlaps when what you know sort of overlaps with what I know we can be said to share cultural information it's so dark matter of the mind is just what we know but we don't normally we're not normally able to explain like why do I stand like this Peter Hass stand like this why do they stand like that well if I ask them to explain that to me they're not going to be any more able to explain that than me standing like this we take that more space because we don't walk in the jungle we walk side by side Peter house walk one after the other and they stand like this because it takes less space and if you're in the jungle my wife was the first one to notice this for me she said oh that's how you died she's a scuba diver and she said when you dive you have your arms like this because you take up less space so I thought about it yeah that's a good explanation but it's dark matter of the mind that tells us how we sit Peterhouse it different than us they stand different than us they walk different than us and many other cultures do the same there there's a lot of variation culture which is so important to me and to many other researchers is an abstract network that shapes and connects our social roles our knowledge structures and our values our values and the way we rank our values so for example you might think that eating food is a value and you might also think that stain and good physical shape is a value if you rank good food over shape you'll look different than if you rank being in shape over good food even though you value both so how you rank the values is also very important so there is a concept called universal grammar I don't want to spend much time on it the first person in the United States to propose this was not known Chomsky but Charles Sanders purse who argued that universal grammar is based around how we interpret signs later Chomsky proposed universal grammar but for purse it was not innate it was not genetic it was logical for Chomsky it was innate I'm not gonna refer much more to these ideas because I think that there are some widespread features of human language but that the explanation is the problem of communication and the differences are the result of culture now we want to talk about tools because when we talk about Homo erectus we have to have an understanding of where tools come from because tools are really some of the best evidence we have of erectus we're going to see that we actually have a lot of evidence about how smart and how active Homo erectus was but first we need to think about their tools because they left stone tools behind us recently I was with my colleague Larry Barham at the University of Liverpool and Larry and I are doing research on homo erectus tools and we were holding a 500 thousand year old scraper that Larry had just brought back from Africa and his colleague walked in who has considered John gall at one of the world's greatest authorities on stone tools and he looked at the scraper and he told he told us he said oh that's from East Africa it doesn't look like what the rest of West Africans made so 500,000 years ago Homo erectus was already dividing their tools their tools look different according to which culture they came from so tools are individual devices or processes that meet perceived needs of individuals and communities they're a set of devices processes and expertise used to harness the properties of a particular material but they're full culturally constructed repertoire of knowledge you can't build tools without cultural understanding you have so we know that other species use tools but no other species stored tools stores tools carries tools as long as humans and makes tools according to a fixed pattern so although you might find a chimpanzee using a tool in one purpose and that is learned humans use tools in a very different way so in a sense we still are the tool using species human technology in meshes the material with the ideational we have an idea and we turn it into material that's where technology comes to play and it's constructed socially and tools always become symbols if if I have a tool that I use for gardening and I look at that tool it's gonna remind me of gardening it symbolizes what it's used for and that's a very important fact to remember about tools they always become symbols in human cultures the learning of technical skills takes place using a combination of abilities and it we have done a number of experiments I say we I mean people at the University of Liverpool and other large departments of archaeology have done experiments with stone tool construction and some of the tools I'm going to show you look very simple but it takes a PhD student about 500 hours of practice to learn how to use to make these tools so they may look simple but they're not they're difficult to make and they wanted me to try to make some so that I could get an experience but I talked to one of the PhD students and she said your hands will get very bloody because you're gonna miss a lot so I said I'll do that next time and so I have also seen a lot of tools made in the Amazon that we might consider trivial like bows and arrows and blow guns and yet those are extremely complex things the other thing we know about tools is that just example is not enough not even for stone tools there has to be some verbal explanation and correction to be able to make these tools experiments done with Homo sapiens PhD students and Homo sapiens professors find that they cannot make the tools simply watching somebody else make them they have to be corrected they have to be instructed so signs especially symbols icons indexes have three basic components there's an object we want to talk about so if I point if I point there the object and then my pointing is the sign and the way we interpret it is that there so all all signs whether their indexes icons or symbols have objects representations and interpretation all animals use indexes in fact I would say that everything all all living life at least uses indexes how do trees know when to drop their leaves the shortening of the days so even trees in a sense take the index of the shortening of the days and interpret it as this is the time to drop my leaves not mentally although purse would have said in a sense even trees have a mind their non-intentional in the sense that the if I smell something it was not it doesn't have to be my intention to smell it as soon as I smell it I know that the originator of the smell is nearby there non-arbitrary so there's an index is determined by the thing that causes it there's nothing arbitrary about it so smoke is caused by fire we don't use a cloud to indicate fire that would be arbitrary we use a smoke signal and they show something like if I smell something and I can't see it it's it's not in my immediate environment it's displaced that turns out to be very important for a language when something is not here but we can still talk about it icons look like things they're not also non-intentional if something looks like something else well that's just the way it is I didn't I can create a painting in which case I intend for it to look like something else but if I see my reflection in the water I don't intend for my reflection to look like me it just does their non-arbitrary and their displacement and symbols are very different from these the conceptual step from icons and indexes to symbols is not that big conceptually but it is crucial for language as Neil Armstrong said when he stepped on the moon one small step for man one giant leap for mankind so the symbols were cognitively in a sense small steps but they led to a giant leap for our species and they are intentional we intend to use the word dog to refer to canine when we use it in English and they're prerequisites for language no symbols no language period there's no chance to have a language if you don't have symbols so we have fossilized indexes so these footprints are 3.7 million years old they're left by australopithecines and if you look at them Mary Leakey discovered these in Africa you can see that there's a large australopithecine and a small one and they walk and they turn and look at something and then they keep walking so 3.7 million years ago we can see probably a parent and a child roaming time together right after they passed over this it must have rained and this has a property like concrete cement so they hardened and have lasted for 3.7 million years now this guy Australopithecus africanus is our friend they've stood about this tall this tall in this range and they were very strong they had a terrible bite but they walked upright just like we do and they were the first ones to start making tools of stone tools and they were the first ones to start to contemplate icons and we'll see evidence for that so this is a three million year old pebble it's called the maka ponds got pebble it was discovered in a cave in South Africa it is about this big it's currently in the British Museum in London most good artifacts from around the world or stolen and put in the British Museum and it doesn't match the other stones in the cave or any of the stones around it this stone came from miles away from the cave why do you think it was found in the cave why would australopithecines carry this several miles to the cave the most lot the the easiest explanation the most widely accepted explanation is because it looks like a human face so they recognized reuleaux pithos een face there were no humans around at the time probably so they they kept this because it reminded them of of themselves they looked at it it was fascinating to them it's the first example we have of a species recognising and and in a sense contemplating an icon australopithecines also made tools so for example 3.3 million years ago we see the evidence for the first stone tool technology in Oldowan a gorge in Tanzania and these are called Oldowan tools but there's no real design to them really the way you make a tool like this is you take one rock and break another one and then you have a tool you get a sharp edge so there's technologically very easy to do and in fact chimpanzees can make these same tools icons resemblances this is supposed to resemble Jesus the Peter ha asked me one time Dan what does Jesus look like is he dark like us or is he white like you and I said well some people say he was right like me and other people say it was dark like you yeah but you saw him so what did he look like and I said well actually I never saw him but your father saw him no my father never saw him so they said who do you know that saw him well I don't know anybody who saw him so why are you telling us about him I didn't have sufficient information but anyway that's supposed that's what some people think he might have looked like interesting hairdo also we know that tools can be symbols here is a very common symbol that uses tools this represents the power of labour which many of the people who drew the tools never did actually but so tools can be very important symbols so when you get if you get symbols how do you make a language out of them it turns out that field research across a wide variety of currently spoken languages Pete aha for example suggests that for the syntax for the basic grammar really all you need are symbols in an agreed-upon order so you say I'm gonna put the subject first and the verb second and the object third or I'm gonna put the verb first however you want to do it but as soon as you agree on it you've got a way of interpreting the symbols you've got a grammar you can say actually anything you want to say oh that's all you need to say anything that can be said in the world it's it's hard for some people to to recognize this fact anything natural you can't say you can't say it in certain ways but you can say it we all know that when we learn another language it won't have the same grammar that we have and so we try to use our grammar and we realize that's not going to work so we have to learn that other grammar so that's what the way these languages would have been they would have been simple symbols in a linear order in a agreed-upon order and with that they could say anything but they wouldn't have said it exactly like we do the other kind of grammar is a grammar that has more structure to it so maybe it has phrases like noun phrases or verb phrases that's called a hierarchical grammar recent study by a Swedish linguist has argued that in most spoken European languages that's all you find is hierarchy you don't find elaborate recur of structures and that's the final kind of grammar is that it allows structures with both hierarchy and recursion what is recursion it means to reoccur one thing occurring inside another of the same type so I can say the boy who was here yesterday who everybody likes is not going to be here today because he's not a very friendly boy something like that that didn't make much sense but you can put one sentence inside another you would say the same thing in pita ha as separate sentences so they can interpret just as well as we can anybody can interpret that way but we don't put that kind of structure in the grammar so grammar is secondary symbols or primary erectus also started to save icons just as we do just as also rope if things do so the first erectus icon that we find in the world is found in modern-day Morocco and it's this this is actually a cuttlefish bone but they carried this around with them and kept it apparently made them happy to have this three hundred to seven hundred thousand years old and then we start to see erectus tools and erectus tools were quite quite complicated it's a special kind of technology called a julienne technology and it lasted for over a million years and it's a very effective stone tool technology modern research using very powerful microscopes studying these tools suggests that some of them did in fact have handles they were they were more complex than just handheld but these handheld axes require a lot of work so they require shaping they require imagination they require intention that require planning and they require memory memory is a crucial component of human language you have to have human level memory to have grammar but how much memory do you need not as much as you might think a recent study by Steve pianted OC and colleagues has shown that more or less what we need to remember any language is 1.5 megabytes of memory roughly a floppy disk and all if you remember what a floppy disk is so-so not that much it's not nearly as complicated as we think and the smallest thing we have to remember is the grammar that's the easiest part the number one thing that takes up memory are the symbols also neuroscience work by Evelina fedorenko at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that the language networks in the brain the way we store language grammar is secondary what we mainly store are symbols so all of this recents neuro scientific research supports the idea that symbols are what are crucial to human language Homo erectus had several inventions and innovations they were the first to control fire they were the first to pre shape stone tools because to make some of these stone tools you can't just start breaking off the tool you have to break off some parts in a to leave a particular shape and from that particular shape you're able to derive the tool that you want so it requires stages and planning and they also used wood tools and bone tools and if I'm correct they made boats as well which is a pretty elaborate tool so again we find these kinds of tools in Africa and we find that the tools not only were built similar ways in particular cultures we find that they colored the tools that they the tools played a role in their culture but they put components of this on the tools that we would call style things that went beyond function that represented something about the person who made the tools so these are very interesting facts about the tools so that looks fairly simple but again this is the kind of tool that takes hundreds of hours for a PhD student who study this to learn and and we find these going back over a million years half dean is the next step half dean is putting one tool together with another tool making handles that represents so if you have a stone axe that's great if you have a hand axe with a handle that's even better so handles are very important and finding handles evidence for handles in stone tools of Homo erectus is very important and we find such evidence my colleague Larry Barham again this has not yet been confirmed so by a geologist but it looks like there's a site in Ghana where there was a multi step dyeing process for tools to color tools differently by an erectus community if the date is confirmed that will be the oldest evidence we know of decoration and function and that certainly goes beyond what is needed for the tools and represents symbolic value of the people so just give a few more examples there's a hand axe there is a cleaver these all have different functions there's a pic we find these all among the Homo erectus we find far more tools among Homo neanderthalensis in fact the toolkit for homeland neanderthalensis involves hundreds of tools it's difficult to imagine that they would have that a father would have told his son to go get him a specific tool simply by grunting mmm they would have had to have a word for these tools to get the right tool so these are at Julian stone tools they require a great deal of work and then the final stage of Homo erectus tool making our levallois tools which are much more elaborate much sharper much more attractive looking tools much more functionally superior and all the tools had to have these various components so these are not like tools made by chimps these are not like tools made by Australopithecus africanus these are very important tools that that represent cultural knowledge cultural cooperation and so if this is all the evidence that I had I would say that Homo erectus was capable of symbols and it was capable of symbols that had language but this is not all the evidence that we have we'll look at a little bit more of these tools this is a seven hundred thousand year old shell found in Java so this is long before Homo neanderthalensis before humans Homo sapiens actually Homo erectus is human homo means human so Homo erectus is human Homo neanderthalensis is human homo sapiens is human it's funny that we gave ourselves the name wise human Homo sapiens but the evidence for that is fairly weak at times and and so if you look at this show very carefully you can find these geometrical markings on the show not only do you see the geometrical markings probably made by a shark's tooth there's there it's there made in one motion without picking the shark's tooth up they were trying to do something they were representing something or this isn't the only example they actually did it in stone so this is also done by Homo erectus what what did this mean well we don't have any idea it might not have met anything except the attempt to express something but this took a lot of work this wasn't something that they just were doing play with they were actually creating something at least at the very least you could say it was art this is the oldest piece of art we actually know of the venus of bharat rom what got me interested in the study of human evolution was touring the Israeli the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem this that's where this Venus is kept and it said the world's oldest art 250 thousand years old and I thought they must have a zero they must have an extra zero there could only be twenty five thousand years old but no it's 250,000 years old and it was done by Homo erectus because when homo erectus went out of africa when Homo neanderthalensis went out of Africa when Homo sapiens went out of Africa they went through the Middle East you just go to North Africa and turn right you're out of Africa that's the Middle East and so a lot of these artifacts are found in the Middle East what is today the Middle East so this wasn't entirely shaped by Homo erectus but we can see that they did do some shaping of it and that it was it has died on it which indicates that they were decorating this so what are the implications of erectus tools well they're symbolic and they show social component they simultaneously are indexes of the tasks they have to do so if you have us a tool it's going to indicate the tasks it's for their icons they resemble other tools they sort of work like a blueprint for other tools and they're symbols of the value and labor of the community tools or all of that symbols in a linear order equal language the leap to grammar is false small far smaller than the leap to symbols to get a grammar you first have to have symbols you can't have grammar without symbols and call it a language but we do find grammars without language in DNA we find it in many ways that the universe is structured RNA bird speech or bird sounds so we can find grammar apart from language what makes the jump between grammar and language is the presence of symbols I don't like the idea of a proto language I don't I think once you have symbols and put them in an order that's language so I don't find the need for the term proto-language it's like calling the first Ford automobile the model P a proto car actually it was a car just so so Homo erectus were humans they weren't protohumans they were humans but they were Model T humans were Ferrari humans where the souped up version so culture in the sense that we've defined it here was present among Homo erectus to get from all these other things to modern languages so PETA ha for example has very simple syntax but it's word structure is extremely complicated so in English how many verb forms do you have well it's pathetic you have 5 sing sang sung singing sings that's it and so if you can't learn that in English I don't know how to help you Spanish or Portuguese we'll have 30 to 50 different forms for verbs Peter ha has as many as 65 thousand forms for any particular verb so when I say that the syntax is simple I don't mean that the whole language is simple that's not what I'm saying at all but it can start very simple and still do the same thing Chinese shows us that we don't need any of those suffixes we can simply have separate words Chinese is two words structure like pita ha is two sentence structure it simply shows that there's nothing inferior about not having complex words it's just another way that cultures choose to do things so linguistic systems add all sorts of layers and make it more complicated and the function of all layers like I'm using gestures right now I can't talk without using my hands and neither can you nobody can even blind people use gestures when they talk and why do we do that because we communicate with our entire body language is communication language is a special form of communication it's the highest form of communication and it's not just with our mouths that we communicate not just with our brains but with our entire body our facial expressions all of that is crucial to language so that's one of the layers other layers are things like intonation so yesterday what did John give to Mary in the library so it goes up and it goes down very simple all languages use pitch and Pete aha we can say ear which is aware and skin which is away and foreigner which is away and Brazil nut show which is away and hand which is away and if you can't hear the tones here's another example McGee I means friend McGee I means enemy chair means I chair means excrement so we had all these levels of sound we individual sounds all the way up to the conversational features that we use to keep keep things going these things enhance speech they make it easier to follow so everything we add makes it easier to follow and why do we want to make it easier to follow because language is communication we do enhancement in grammar as well so this is an icon this is an icon of a sentence diagram it shows that in a sentence we yesterday what did John give to Mary in the library there's a structure to it that structure can help us interpret it but it's not necessary so I'm arguing have claimed in the past that there are languages that don't have that structure does that structure help yes is it necessary no and so there are all these different levels of grammar they're morphemes there are words phrases paragraphs Pete aha actually do have paragraphs they don't write the language but they use intonation to mark not only sentences but paragraphs so that's kind of interesting and they have international features of discourse and international features of conversation so all of these things exist in Pete aha even though the sentence itself is quite simple gestures are another thing they're very important there are there are people who specialized in the study of gestures and the gestures we use in spoken speech are not the same as the gestures that are used in sign language because sign language is just another form of language which shows that you don't even need to be able to make sounds that have a fully functioning language did Homo erectus start with sign language I don't think so I think he started with everything at once because we communicate with our entire body if we can use sounds we will if we can use gestures we will if we can use facial expressions we will humans communicate with every tool at their disposal why because language isn't all that great so you might have been in an argument with someone in your life you might have gotten a divorce in your life and it probably occurred as a breakdown in communication if language were perfect maybe there wouldn't be those kinds of arguments but language doesn't always work language also doesn't tell us everything it leaves context so if if you're waiting for your spouse and you're gonna go to a party and you say are you ready yet and the spouse says fix yourself a drink what does that mean what is that got to do with anything it means I am NOT ready yet and don't bug me just relax and I told a co-author last night over email in Boston I said have you finished your part of the paper yet I'm really tired he said go to bed that means he's not done yet so so all of these things play into it as well as our cultural knowledge we can't communicate without cultural knowledge so erectus traveled all over the world the first travelers they were in China almost two million years ago they were in Greece they were in modern-day Israel they were all over the world and in fact we now know that they were in the Philippines 700,000 years ago how did they get there they didn't swim they didn't ride a tsunami tsunamis don't go that way by the way you know they go to land they didn't get on a vegetable raft they made a boat and they sailed there that's the simplest and that's not the only island they were at so we're gonna talk a little bit about this settlement in Israel yes sure have been not Yaakov and then I'll stop and see if we have questions I'll just go through some of this stuff let me skip that so so this settlement of homo erectus is here in Israel just above the Sea of Galilee it's about seven hundred thousand years old seven hundred fifty thousand and excavations show that erectus had settlements with specialized parts one part for processing plants one part for processing animals one part that seemed to be more of a social space so they had an organized village structure and this is long before we came around they also traveled the ocean so there are many places across the ocean that we find erectus settlements 250,000 years ago 700,000 years ago their sea to have been an expansion about 700,000 years agos and all of the places I'm going to show you have never been connected by land to where they got they've always been separated by ocean Flores the island of Flores in Indonesia is separated from land and was separated from land and the time of Homo erectus by the world's strongest ocean current you cannot swim there you cannot ride a raft there if you try to write a raft you'll you'll go out to the ocean you've got to be able to paddle you've got to be able to put some force behind it animals could swim across there it's about the size of the English Channel that back then the island of Socotra 1.4 million years ago a Russian archeological team has discovered evidence of Homo erectus settlements on this island 1.4 million years old erectus not only made tools but they used tools so we find this special axe this is a hand axe and it's colored if you notice and it's called Excalibur that's a name some archaeologists gave but it was found with the skeleton which could indicate seems to indicate that they buried the axe with the skeleton as a symbolic gesture we also find these Shawnigan Spears which are about 400,000 years ago Larry told me recently my co-author that there they probably are more recent than that if they are they could have been made by erectus or they could have been made by Neanderthals but they're very interesting tools wood tools that have survived for hundreds of thousands of years and they indicate culture and they indicate cooperation and social conventions so 1.8 million years ago symbols plus a g1 language just symbols in linear order would have been enough to say whatever they wanted to say whatever we wanted to say does that mean that that's the kind of language they had no they could have had a language just as complicated as ours but I'm simply saying that even with a language much simpler than ours they would have had the ability to say whatever their culture wanted them to say so how old is language it's about 1.8 to 2 million years old Neanderthals and sapiens were born into a linguistic world there are a lot of australopithecines I won't tell you the names of all of these I probably can't remember them myself but these are just species of australopithecines evolution did a lot of work before we ever appeared evolution was experimenting killing off species that were according to some estimates there were 20 species of humans before they got to us and once again somebody asked me at a presentation if erectus had language why did they die out well there are a lot of people in the world who died out who had perfectly functioning relative clauses that doesn't preserve you all the time as as as many people in Europe found out about 70 years ago so the the idea that humans die out doesn't necessarily imply anything about language but we do know that Homo erectus evolved into us so in a sense they never died out they became us so I like this photo because it shows you know you normally see the progression of males so there's a progression of females evolving and and so we started about 6 million years ago the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans lived are two Pittacus it's split into chimpanzees and humans chimpanzees are therefore our closest relatives some people have claimed that chimpanzees and humans are part of a larger genus that we're just hairless chimpanzees somebody said if you're right humans are just talking apes well that's right we are talking apes that's all we are this is the planet of the apes and we are in charge of it thank you [Applause] thank you thank you very much and this is the perfect time for you all to ask your questions that I do hope you have been thinking about for the past time I don't know how it's gonna go on technically we do have a couple of microphones we will start running around with them and in between I will use as usually I will use and try to not abuse my privileges as a host and ask the first question which is about the relationship between to use to making and language you said that there have been experiments that it's difficult to get a modern homo sapiens sapiens PhD to learn to have make a tool without language hint have there been contrary experiments where languages has been specifically off and yet people were able to learn to make tools because this seems to be a very strong argument for language using Homo erectus if it's impossible actually to learn without language yes they have definitely tried to get people to learn to make tools without using language and they're not successful as far as building boats there's actually a paper by a linguist from the Max Planck Institute David Gill called how much language does it take to build a boat and he talks about getting together what would you need now someone suggested that you could try this by getting 30 people to build a boat who spoke different languages and couldn't communicate with each other but they still have languages so the only way to do this is to get 30 creatures who have no concept of language and see if they can build a boat and the answer is no and it's an answer from a thought experiment there's no evidence to suggest they couldn't accept everything we know about the complexity of building boats if they can't make stone tools making a boat is a much harder thing but what about babies I mean babies don't have language but they do learn a lot yes they do babies so what makes humans able to learn language when other creatures can't is there such a thing as a language organ well it's not in the brain it is the brain it is the size of our brain and the structure of our memories and the and the rapidity of the connections between our brain the rapidity of thought the the enormous memory we have which children also have far superior to other creatures that enables them to start to learn they're exposed my dog knows quite a few words so I know my dog can learn symbols my dog knows the difference between past and present tense so if I say to my dog walk she gets very excited and and wants to go out the door but when we come right back from a walk and I say the same thing walk she looks at me very puzzled what we just did a walk so it shows that she understands more than we sometimes think dogs understand and I love my dog I think she's a smartest dog in the world but compared to a child she's stupid I hate to say that but but so humans have huge advantages okay thank you now I will disappear from your sight but don't worry and I will start walking around and taking questions by the way is there a second microphone somewhere there or am I the only person handing out voice to people there is one I deliberately ended a bit early so we could I was questioned that was weird we had a voice all right so I will started walking I saw a hand over here and by the way the questions may be asked in Polish as well we can translate them on to go yeah I don't know what you're saying but they will yeah I have a question but first of all I'd like to mention the you mentioned Neil Armstrong and how he said one small step for man he made a mistake actually it was supposed to say one small step for a man oh man because it makes more sense yeah I think he was a bit nervous well stressed I would I then just in regards to what you were saying before that people if they were trying to build a boat and they all spoke different languages is it possible that they could actually communicate with signs instead of language so maybe you know before we language actually came into being maybe humans communicated with signs or facial expressions language I think you know they definitely communicated with signs and they had to be symbolic signs not simply indexical or iconic signs to be able to communicate there's a lot of research on on signs in human speech there's a three-volume series by David McNeil from the University of Chicago in which he tries to show how gestures and speech would not have been if we started with sign language for example there would have been no need to develop the other I mean it normally signs repel spoken speech so the the evidence suggests that we communicated with signs with intonation with sounds all at the same time they all started at once I can't prove that what I can say is that whether it was hand signs or vocal signs they had to include symbols to be able to communicate these kinds of things so how was your students of piraha language connected to the theory of a comma or a comma erectus speaking languages okay that's a good question I mentioned the pita huh in a sense not at all and as since the the pita have nothing to do with Homo erectus but in another sense by doing field research we are exposed to a vast variety of human language where we find possibilities that if we didn't do the filters research we would be unaware of for example if I hadn't done field research on the peat aha I would not know that there are cultures that have no religion that there are cultures that have no numbers that there are cultures that where every person knows the name of every species in their environment my knowledge of the species would have been very limited the capito ha are hunter-gatherers homo erectus were hunter-gatherers so in a sense they had similar communicative needs the pita how are Homo sapiens Homo erectus was not Homo sapiens so they're quite different any pita ha would have been vastly just lice we would be vastly more intelligent than homo erectus but that doesn't mean that homo erectus can talk what so the main thing Peter hunt tells me is that you don't need elaborate grammar to have a perfectly functioning language but other than that it has no connection this is a different line of research why do we need elaborate dramas at all or what makes us choose drama one grammar to grammar three ok so that's also a very good question when you have so for example when you introduce literacy into any society the grammar changes it becomes more complex we write more complex sentences than we speak why do we do that because you can pack more information into an individual sentence and you don't have to worry about memory because you can go back to the page each one of these grammatical elaborations makes it easier to interpret the symbols they rely less on context and more on the grammar itself so grammar is a huge aid to interpreting symbols the Pete aha for example recursion is not useful to them because there's a lot of noise in the environment so they repeat a lot of things if you see a Pete ahaa story they repeat the same thing over and over why did they do that it's not because they can't remember what they said but it's because there's noise in the environment and the more I repeat it the easier it is to follow the story whereas in in modern in industrial societies we have many aids to recover the information so all of these grammars work which but the G 3 grammar has a number of devices that are more efficient for packing information tightly so if you want the information packed tightly recursion is great hierarchy is great if you want it spread out and you want a slower information rate because of noise in the environment and ability to recover what was said G 1 is better there are some psychological knowledge about that we cannot perceive physically the things that we cannot names with language and I was thinking well what do you think what do you think about it yes my son who is the as an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Miami has written a book on this very idea and it is true that our language affects the way we think but not entirely or science would not be possible science is discovering things we don't didn't have words for when the physicist murray gell-mann discovered a particle there was no name for that particle so he took a word from James Joyce from Finnegan's Wake and he called it a quark that's fine he found something there was no name for so our languages do affect the way we think but they don't determine the way we think we can always get outside of our language they're not a straightjacket they're not a prison it's very popular to think that we cannot think outside of our language but we can question oh sorry I sort of invite you to speculate a little bit when do you think that rare poetry and song and obviously there's a reason that I'm bracketing those together start to emerge well intonation pitch the frequency of our vocal cords in so we cannot make sounds without pitch being involved we have vibrations in our vocal cords each individual sound has what is called its fundamental frequency that would have been present with erectus from the very beginning also so that's the basis of music all music comes from the fundamental frequency of the human voice singing but we also as humans we play with things so as soon as we had cymbals somebody was using them in unexpected ways and when you start doing things in unexpected ways you lead to artistic forms of language or you don't have communication so the first attempts to communicate would have relied heavily on context but I think these kinds of things probably entered early on I mean what else did humans have to do you know you find your food and you know you can have sex and then you do something else so there's there's not a whole lot of alternatives if you're a hunter-gatherer the pita ha spend most of their day talking because it's very easy to find food so it takes about 15 hours a week for the pita ha to provide food for their family pretty easy the 2 hours a day and you all the fish you need so sit around and talk and tell jokes so they tell jokes and laugh and make fun of me and stuff like that I got two questions first why not Homo habilis they produce tools how they did it without language and second question why Homo erectus if they had language why the progress was so slow it was 1 million years of boredom very good questions on Homo habilis I'm not at all sure that they were different from Homo erectus I know that's a common view but Homo habilis was a precursor of homo erectus and might have just been another version of Homo erectus we know too little about those species still to say with with precision or with certainty that Homo habilis was definitely a different species from Homo erectus so I sort of lumped them together as far as okay so Homo erectus had language when did it take him so long to do things we don't know what that question means what does it mean to say it takes us so long you know why has it taken humans so long to give up clothes I mean we still wear clothes maybe someday we won't wear clothes and then people will say why did people use clothes for so long there are certain tools that we use cultures are very conservative and the obvious fact that erectus was not as smart as we are innovation there are two great forces in society imitation and innovation imitation is when you wear a jersey of your favorite a hockey player or your favorite football player or you act like someone else you sing their music innovation is usually fatal it usually doesn't work if you want to make money you've got to be innovative but most innovative people don't make money they just are looked at like idiots so if you come to school dress differently you just look strange so when the environment stays the same it always favors imitation because the problem has already been solved and you just imitate and you've got the solution why screw up a good thing but when the environment changes innovation can be favored so innovation is to culture as mutation is to the to biology and it's usually fatal so if cultures are doing okay they don't tend to innovate much I'm sorry I was supposed to interject between but the microphone didn't work but I have to ask you this question do you know any piraha jokes most peta ha jokes have to do with things that I couldn't say here or that they you know they I mean really do you you may freely we're among humanists there's nothing to us well I you know I remember as a missionary I told the PETA ha about Jesus for the first time and the next day a PETA ha man came to me says ok we don't want to hear any more about Jesus why not because last night he came into the village and he had a penis this big that was very funny to them they thought that was very funny I have no idea what that means but everybody was laughing when he told me that so he said he scared all the women and so we don't want to hear any more about him so that's a PETA hot joke thank you thank you ok we all learned something today yes first of all thank you very much for a very interesting lecture I'm here on your right oh yeah right thanks for the very interesting lecture so actually what was interesting for me you said that the most difficult part actually in learning language is learning symbols not actually the grammar so it's quite country intuitive to what we think as humans so my question would be having in mind that we have a lot of different languages in world and surely they interact with different I would say within different cultures we have to learn different tones or more complicated grammar that's language in which you are being born and through years and thousands of years you your ancestors etc does have enough effect on our brain and are there any languages that enhances some particular skills within particular cultures yes language is a cognitive technology so for example there are societies that I have done field research on that have no numbers not even the number one unsurprisingly they don't do math that doesn't mean that the people are too stupid to do math it means that their language doesn't have the cognitive technology to do math and and in the history of our species many societies when they came into contact with other societies that had math invented math so that's just one example but there are all sorts of things you know the PETA ha don't name colors some people find it odd that the PETA ha don't have numbers and they don't name colors but they are sort of the if you're a philosopher there are the ultimate nominal lists they are not realists they are nominalist they don't believe in the universal things they don't talk about the universal things they talk so so David Hume would have been quite at home with the PETA ha and it has nothing to do with intelligence it's a philosophical perspective on the universe so yes language is a cognitive technology and some languages facilitate things and dampen other things but the interesting thing about our species is that we evolved to be flexible we didn't evoke humans have about 23,000 genes corn has about 46,000 genes why does corn have so many more genes than we do well one possible explanation is because our genes work together to produce flexibility and give us many more options they're like letters of the alphabet that combine and have a syntax corn has to have everything determined for it if it floods where there's corn the corn will not get up and walk away it will just die we move if it's raining we go find someplace where it's not raining humans are flexible anything one human can do another human can do but they probably won't because if they were raised in different cultures we'll have different values different knowledge structures different ways of talking and different ways of thinking so make sure all of your children are bilingual I think we have space for two three more questions I see one in the back and the front I would like to ask about the process of learning and you know how language is what were the first steps and is there any methodology how is it possible to for me to learn it or for a child Peter how to learn it for you so for me I got off the airplane for the first time to our flight in and the Peter house surrounded the airplane I'm a linguist I also was very airsick I feel like vomiting but I couldn't because it was a big crowd there so I took I I picked up a stick and I said stick and a Peter ha man said II I thought that probably means stick so then I dropped it and I said stick falls and he said he make it cobby I said probably means stick fell to the ground I hear stick in there you know he may get Kobe so then I picked up two sticks and I thought they had numbers then but I said two sticks fall he said yeah well he may get kalbi and then I picked up a leaf by I he McGee Cobb a lightweight you know he may get Talbot then I got colors and then I sat down and they say I liked it and I stood up and I said sit dopey hi so by the end of the day I was you know making senses actually there's a demonstration of me doing this for the linguistic Society of America with a totally different language where I speak Pete aha and this person speaks their language so if you look Dan ever at monolingual demonstration you'll see how I did that it's sort of how children learn it except they have a lot more loving care than I did but and they also are exposed to the language 24 hours a day and children start to learn the language twin in the womb in the womb they can also they can already feel their mother's international structures they can tell what kind of foods the mother eats if the mother eats a lot of chili peppers the child is going to feel that the child starts learning about diet about fear about intonation all these things in the womb so they don't come out as a blank slate they come out with with knowledge yes by the way I'm gonna interject again I have the microphone you know that's nice but you used learning language is something you do without linguistic instructions right exactly this is a very complex skill that by definition you have to learn without linguistic instructions so wouldn't this be an indication that you can learn extremely complicated processes without any sort of linguistic except that language bootstraps on itself it's a cyclical process as soon as you learn the first word you use that to learn the second word so it's both the building as well I guess yes but building so okay so what's the difference between learning a language and learning to build a boat learning your first language is building your identity it's becoming who you are and becoming part of the culture it is constructing a bridge of communication between yourself and your parents you've got to do that or you don't survive so learning a language is the most important it's also the most complicated task we'll ever learn obviously learning to build a boat is trivial compared to learning a language but the motivation to build a boat is quite different and so it also requires cooperation I mean one person according to the Bible Noah built a big boat pretty much by himself so it can be done apparently by its itself but but it when it requires cooperation all of these other tasks we know they require social engagement language requires social engagement it's even harder but the child's survival depends on it and their identity depends on it as the psychologist John Piaget said okay thank you I've seen hands say so hi I believe you said that languages and the language that a culture speaks answers needs within that culture and I believe you said that impute AHA verbs have as many as 65,000 forms is that right yes what does the piraha language need 65,000 forms good good question they don't have tenses so in all those 65,000 forms there's no past tense future tense present tense but what there is on all those things is directional markers that tell you well at first there's aspect it'll tell you whether the action was complete or is it ongoing where or whether it was just not finished it will tell you I said let's say I saw a bird the verb will have to tell me whether the verb was verdict the bird was vertically above me where it was on the horizon whether it was in a tree they're little suffixes that indicate all of this that's very useful if you're a hunter-gatherer so they have these complex structures it turns out that humans are pretty smart they can learn those complex structures every you know the peat aha when I'm with them in the jungle they'll point to something and say what is that Dan what do you call that in English tree and what's that tree what's that tree you just have the same word for all of these things yeah that's all I have some people know more they call them all by their species name because they know what they all are every child knows that they take me into the jungle the favorite Peter ha game you talk about jokes we walk maybe three four or five kilometres out into the jungle and then they say Dan take us back because they know I don't know where I'm at and so they it's so fun to watch me lost they'll go hunting and they'll say Dan you're making too much noise you stand right here we'll come get you so I stand by a tree and my bones would still by be that by that tree if they hadn't come to get me so there's a lot of cultural information I would need to survive in the jungle you know I don't know how to hunt I don't know how to fish they worry about me I'm totally incompetent as a human being but somehow I have money and that allows me to buy food they don't understand money they say how do you get money you just sit on your butt all day that's how professors make a living sitting on their butt all day I think we will do the last question we are on the high note let's end on a high note a second one in the back I don't know if you've already asked a question if somebody who has I who I would like to ask about the way our language shapes our brain so you said that societies that don't have any names for numbers and don't have any quantifiers like the piraha are not able to do maths logically but you also wrote in one of your articles about the period that they were when they were trading with brazilians who came by boat to their village they were able to tell somehow which of them were honest and which were not honest and they were right in their judgment so how come they were able to do that because they can recognize quantities so if if I give if I give you this many Brazil nuts and you give me back this many goods fine if I give this guy that many Brazil nuts and he gives me back this many goods he's better so its recognition of relative quantities and not counting that that it Able's us to do that they do recognize that when I go to the Brazilians I know exactly what I'm going to get for my money this puzzles them because they never know exactly what they're gonna get and and so if the traitor is dishonest they get very little if they're honest they get more but the traitor who gives them more will be the more popular one unless the traitor gives them whiskey in which they'll always trade with them because that's the number one thing even though it's the cheapest thing to buy is Casa there's artichoke Casa which costs about 39 cents a bottle and they like that by the way you only have to observe kindergarten kids trading stuff they don't know mathematics but they know exactly the value of every toy and this is this is full-fledged economics with perfect precision with zero mathematics and I have two small kids and they are perfect in balancing value but they don't know mathematics well if you look at the the US comedy movie home alone if you saw that movie Macaulay real Christmas Merry Christmas Macaulay Culkin gets left behind and nowadays he's left behind as an actor nobody cares about he but he was left behind as a child why was he left behind as a child because his parents counted the children a Peter ha would never do that they would look each child in the face and they would know their children are there the pinna ha don't need to know how many children they have they know who their children are and they don't leave without them so in a sense that's an advantage I mean this is such an excellent point that I just want to end the question series just to end on this excellent point so thank you very much professor and [Applause] thank you thank you very much thank you all for coming and let's meet again at one of the other fantastic events of the Copernicus first of all have a good evening thank you you

Channel: Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Views: 19,640

Rating: 4.8909092 out of 5

Keywords: Centrum Kopernika Badań Interdyscyplinarnych, Centrum Kopernika, Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Copernicus Center, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Daniel Everett, Language, Pirahã, tribes, Amazon, Indians, anthropology, Dan Everett, Copernicus Festival, 2019

Id: 1ALWRbmAwzY

Length: 78min 10sec (4690 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019