Evolution

After a long trek they reached a new camp, close to a mud-rimmed lake. They set up their hides and made their pallets. But as the dryness continued, life remained hard, and the children and old ones suffered.

One day Sapling brought Mother the head of a young ostrich. Its neck had been severed a hand’s length below the jaw, and the head neatly punctured by a spear.

To bring down a fleet ostrich — to aim for the tiny head of a running bird, from fifty or seventy meters, and to bring it down — was a feat indeed. After months of practice Sapling and the other young hunters had learned to use the spear-thrower to hurl their weapons across unprecedented distances and with stunning accuracy. Mother’s invention was a powerful one. With growing confidence the hunters had begun to penetrate further into the savannah, and soon the prey animals of the plains would learn to fear them greatly. It was as if the hunters had suddenly been given guns.

Today Sapling seemed bursting with the memory of his kill. Before the woman who had first showed him how to use the spear-thrower, he mimed how he had hurled the spear, how it had flexed and leapt, how it had flown to its precise target. "Bird fast, fast," he said, his feet paddling the ground. "Run fast." He pointed to himself. "I, I. Hide. Rock. Bird fast, fast. Spear…" He leapt out from behind his invisible rock and mimed hurling his triumphant spear once more.

Mother had little time for people these days. She was becoming increasingly absorbed in her own new perceptions. But she tolerated Sapling, who was the nearest thing to a friend she had. Absently she listened to his babbling.

"Wind carry smell. Smell touch ostrich. Ostrich run. Now, here. Stand, stand, hide. Wind carry smell. Ostrich here, wind there, wind carry smell away…"

His language was something like a pidgin. The words were simple, just nouns, verbs, adjectives with no inflectional endings. There was still much use of repetition and mime for emphasis. And with little real structure, there was a linguistic free-for-all: It didn’t help communication that no two people, even brought up as siblings, ever talked quite alike.

But still, Sapling now occasionally used sentences. He had picked up the habit from Mother. Each sentence was a genuine subject-verb-object compound. The people’s protolanguage was quickly developing around this seed of structure. Already the chattering people had had to invent pronouns — you, me, him, her — and different ways of expressing actions and their outcomes: I did kill, I am killing, I did not kill… They were able to express comparatives and negatives, explore alternatives. They could consider going to the lake today, or not going to the lake, all in a universe of words, where before they would have had to pick one path or another, or split into factions.

It wasn’t yet a full language. It wasn’t even as rich as a creole. But it was a start, and it was growing fast.

And in a sense Mother had discovered, not invented, that basic sentence structure. Its central logic reflected hominids’ deep apprehension of the world — a world of objects with properties — which reflected in turn a still deeper neural architecture common to most mammals. If a lion could have spoken, or an elephant, it would have spoken this way too. This central underpinning would be shared by almost all the myriad human languages that would follow in the ages to come, a universal template reflecting the essential causality of the world and the human perception of it. But it had taken Mother’s dark genius to give that deep architecture expression, and to inspire the linguistic superstructure that rapidly followed.

And now it was time for another step.

Sapling said something that grabbed her attention. "Spear kill bird," he said excitedly. "Spear kill bird, spear kill bird…"

She frowned. "No, no."

He stopped in midflow. Wrapped up in his performance he seemed to have forgotten she was there. "Spear kill bird." He mimed the spear’s flight. He even picked up the ostrich’s ragged head and arced his outstretched hand toward it just as his spear had flown, straight and true.

"No!" she barked. She got up and grabbed his hand. "You lift hand." She slapped the spear-thrower into his grip. "Hand push stick. Stick push spear. Spear kill bird."

He pulled back, baffled. "Spear kill bird." Isn’t that what I said?