The Origins and Evolution of Language | Michael Corballis | TEDxAuckland

language is probably the hardest problem in science nobody really knows how it works and nobody really knows where it came from and yet we can all do it I think it's a bit like driving a car we can drive a car but we don't really know how the machine works one of the things that makes language unique I think is that we can generate new sentences all the time there's an infinite capacity to say something different in this talk you will probably hear subsidences you've never heard before yet I hope you can understand them animal language or animal communication on the other hand is mostly repetitive automatic and emotional and doesn't create new meanings the English comedian Stephen Fry once uttered the following sentence hold the newsreaders nose squarely waiter or friendly milk or countermand my trousers that sentence I think he was confident and believing had never been had been uttered before and I'm happy to repeat it here in case you needed to compound the problem there is something like 6,000 different languages in the world most of them impenetrable to any other so most people will speak one or maybe two languages or perhaps four or five but there are well over 5,000 languages that will be totally impenetrable to you if I were to do this talk in Bantu or Navajo or perhaps even Portuguese you wouldn't understand what I'm saying so that's an added problem how can there be so many languages each of them impenetrable to all of the others any child though can learn any one of those languages provided they start earlier so that's a paradox any kid can learn any one of them yet most of us only learned one or two of them okay now how are we to solve that problem the common solution is at languages of miracle miraculous thing that happened all at once that comes from the Bible the Old Testament according to the Old Testament the Lord gave language to Adam the people then grew proud and they they built the Tower of Babel in an attempt to get closer to heaven but the Lord was a vengeful God and he destroyed the tower the people scattered and so did the languages and that is the biblical account why we have so many languages now a foremost linguist of our time is Noam Chomsky who's made actually considerable contributions to how we put language together but his notion of how language evolved I think is positively biblical what he thinks is that roughly 90 thousand years ago mutation happened in one individual he doesn't call that individual Adam he calls that individual Prometheus for some reason known to him and from there it spread to all other people and eventually created all the languages of the world that's a biblical story really because it says language happened in a single individual once with a single mutation of some sort and I don't think it makes biological sense there is a representation of the last 7 million years of human evolution since we separated from the great apes humans are right on the very right hand end of that a tiny blip in the last 7 million years we evolved it seems about 200,000 years ago and according to Chomsky language only emerged with about halfway through that span of 200 million years sorry 200 thousand years and I'll show you that that's where the miracle happened and to me that doesn't make much sense because we've got all those millions of years of human evolution from when we decided not to be great apes anymore then it would be offense if I think to Charles Darwin wealthy it's not so around to complain he argued that laying any complex organ like language like the liver of the heart or the brain must have evolved through successive numerous slight modifications and if anybody could find an exception to that that would destroy his theory of evolution but Chomsky's theory then might be that one case and if Chomsky is right then evolutionary theory would be destroyed in Darwin's own terms now I want to try and demonstrate to you that language didn't arrive arise from vocal calls it arose from gestures that language started from making gestures and I put one hand in my pocket so that I went to demonstrate to volubly but I forgot when I can wave around one piece of evidence for that actually comes from the monkey brain and that takes us back about 30 or 40 million years in terms of a common ancestor there's an area a circuit in the monkey brain that is dedicated to making grasped actions the reaching out of picking things up it's called the mirror system because that system is active whenever the monkey reaches out for something or when it sees another animal or person even reaching out and making the same movement so it maps what the monkey sees on to what the monkey can do some people have called it a monkey see monkey do a circuit now it turns out that the equivalent circuit in the human brain is the language circuit and you'll see that on the slide there so that's the language areas in the brain seem to have arisen from this mirror circuit in the monkey brain so in the course of evolution that circuit each having taken over or at least used party deal with language now moving forward a bit in evolution towards ourselves no one has ever been able to teach a great ape to talk or come anywhere near it then people had the either that maybe we can teach them to sign to gesture and there been a number of cases I shown a couple of a layer in which quite reasonable conversations have been had between humans and apes by use of sign language or something like it so they can ask or make simple requests and be understood and the person again can respond and have a little conversation it's not a very good conversation in many ways they cancel to tell you what they did yesterday or gossip about each other but they can make requests and have and make little sentences that are somewhat a generative in the way that human language is another famous case as this is kinzey who's a bonobo and Kenzie uses a kind of an iPad I guess but it's a display of symbols and he points to these symbols they represent objects and actions so he can also ask for things and have little conversations with one of his helpers there as you will see so that shows you I think that in great apes they come closer to language by using either pointing to something or using a form of sign language it's now also known and this has become a hot topic recently that if you look at Apes in the wild they make lots and lots of gestures that seemed much more language like then their vocalizations are so they're much more flexible they as you can see there are some of them you can almost recognize what they're trying to say the one on the top left they are quite interesting it's asking to be I'm sorry that's actually grooming the think the one on the bottom left is asking to be groomed in that spot so the aprile's a match point to a part of the body who wants some other animal to come along and scratch and you can see a bit of a gossip session there on the bottom right now it's also moving force of humans we know of course that sign language is purely gestural it's done silently it's done with gestures of the hands of course but it's also done with gestures of the face so that's a powerful argument I think that language at least can be purely gestural and just as effective as speech we now know that sign language is linguistically sophisticated it uses the same brain areas that spoken language to us and thus a university in the United States called Gallaudet University which in fact uses only sign language in all its classes even when it teaches poetry so there are forms of poetry in sign now we all also all gesture as we speak there's me gesturing I didn't put my hand in my pocket they might but I still had one hand free and I was gesturing a bit while I was talking but in the background you will see there somebody translating me into sign so that person is making somewhat similar gestures as I was making while I was gesturing while I was talking so that does show us some of our correspondence between signing I think and speaking there's another picture of me gesturing and you might notice if you look carefully that my colleagues they look extremely bored now I apologize I'm doing if I'm doing that to you and one of the most actually died you will notice now I think the critical thing that happened between us and Apes was bipedalism so at some point in human evolution beginning really from we we switched or from the from a PUD and B we gradually became more and more upright and that of course freed the hands and the face for a gestural kind of communication and that's where I think it began to become sophisticated so we began to be able to create meanings by combining gestures in various ways I think it probably developed into a form of mime so that people began to mime things I wanted to talk about either something that they've seen on their expeditions at Hunter gathering or whatever or maybe what they plan to do tomorrow or maybe even cost but how about it to each other about ingestible form mimicking each other so I think it probably began as a language like thing beyond what apes can do from around about warp 6 seven million years but the beginning especially I think about six million years ago as I'll try to demonstrate so this our picture again of hominin evolution that's ourselves from about seven million years ago it's a bit tragic of course that all of them there are about 20 different hominin species there that are beyond the Apes and they've all become extinct with one exception and that's again that tiny little blip called homo sapiens on the right so be careful out there on the street because all of our other cousin species are no longer with us okay so what happened then is there was increasing bipedalism through that period and we probably became fully by people bipedal about two million years ago when that gives us much more canvas to play on if we're trying to understand how lecture our language actually came about it makes more sense I think than supposing there was a sudden mutation 57 90 thousand years ago that suddenly gave us language that to me makes no biological sense I should add by the way that the idea that there was a sudden event is widely held not just by Chomsky by a lot of archaeologists although most biologists I talk to I think it doesn't make sense okay now then you might ask why is 6000 languages so what happens I think in that course we started out by kind of miming but then it became more less iconic and more arbitrary so language became simplified so it kind of gradually lost its pictorial component it's more efficient to reduce the the symbols that we use with our hands into something that's more conventional or decided by people arbitrarily than it is to try to make them mimic what it is that you see out there so there's more room for variation so I think as people scatter that came out of Africa about 90,000 years ago scattered around the world they the languages that they use adapted to geography and culture and religion perhaps so that's why these things all became different now they became different more different than you might expect because of that's I think that's because we partly design language to keep other people out so the people won't understand us so language is not only a means of communicating it's a means of preventing communication it's a kind of a fortress that we build around us a silo if you like so that's in a way the downside of language and especially speech where it can be quite arbitrary where you decide what sounds will receive or correspond for what things just to recap then I'm maintaining here that language started with a grasping reflex as you see on the left kind of genuinely communicative act by great apes through to something like Homo erectus who probably has a much more sophisticated way of signing and preps the beginnings of grunts and things that were turned into speech but also the beginnings of tools so I think as we lost the manual component then what happened was we freed up the hands a second time the first freeing of the hands was bipedalism but then as language began to develop gesturally we began to lose the manual component again and put the thing in the face the language becomes more dedicated to the face which is also a very expressive organ and eventually I think we put it into the mouth which is a brilliant idea really it's the first example I think of miniaturization for the whole thing instead of having to move your whole body around as you communicate it's tucked away neatly into the mouth and frees up the hands for doing other things and in particular for making things okay now I think it didn't stop there obviously language didn't stop a speech we have developed many more different forms of language since we decided to speak and each of those changes including speech itself has been of enormous importance to our species I think and it's a growing importance it starts perhaps with reading and writing which adds a dimension it first started language to memory so once you start writing things down then they become permanently stored and you can go back to them at any point in time then it gains distance when we got Radio teller telephones then you begin to be able to communicate at vast distances and we go to the Internet where you can communicate instantly with people on the other side of the world and finally to the cell phone which is perhaps the ultimate really it's got both memory and distance and computation so we've kind of in a way now I've got communication to such a level where we've almost emptied our minds into our communication systems in a way then we're also retiring we're returning to visual language writing of course is visual and the cell phone is visual some of you are perhaps already using gestures with your thumbs communicating on your cell phone so we've gone if you'd like I suppose with the cell from from the wagging of tongues to the wiggling of thumbs thank you for listening I'm going to give one more gesture which is one of the few that I know you

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Views: 196,624

Rating: 4.7326608 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science (hard), Body language, Communication, Evolution, Human origins, Language, Psychology, Science, Speech

Id: nd5cklw6d6Q

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 14 2018