Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

George Schaller, as mentioned before, has pointed out that lions hunt game in groups – fairly successfully – without the benefit of language. We cannot say, therefore, that as man turned to the hunting of big game he necessarily had more than the rudiments of language. On the other hand, it would seem highly unlikely that he could manufacture standardised tools, or cave paintings, or beads, without language. But these are all inferential forms of evidence. Is there anything more direct?

We have to remember that many of the skulls of ancient men and women, on which these studies are based, have been in the ground for as much as 2 million years, with rock and earth bearing down on them. Their present-day configuration, therefore, may owe as much to those millennia of pressure as to their original form. Nevertheless, with this (all-important) proviso in mind, we may say as follows. Modern studies, of people living today, show that two areas of the brain are chiefly responsible for language – what are called Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area is located in the left hemisphere, towards the front of the brain, and about halfway up. Individuals with damage to that area generally lose some of their facility with words. Wernicke’s area, slightly larger than Broca’s area, is also in the left hemisphere, but behind it, also about halfway up. Damage to Wernicke’s area affects comprehension.²⁷ There is much more to the brain than this, of course, in relation to language. However, studies of the skulls of H. habilis show that Broca’s area was present with the earliest of the hominids but not with the australopithecines. Pongids (apes), who lack Broca’s area, cannot produce any human speech sounds and they further appear to lack intentional voluntary control of vocal signals: for example, they cannot suppress food-barks even when it is in their best interest to do so.²⁸ On the other hand, several experiments in the late twentieth century show that chimps possess a nascent language ability in that, although they couldn’t speak, they could learn American Sign Language. This suggests (to some) that language ability is very old.²⁹

In line with such reasoning, each of the skulls unearthed at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel and dated to 95,000–90,000 BP, had a completely modern supra-laryngeal vocal tract: ‘These fossil hominids probably had modern speech and language.’³⁰ Palaeontological anatomists also find no reason why early humans should not have had modern syntax.³¹ This suggests that H. habilis had a form of language, more sophisticated than the half-dozen or so calls that may be distinguished among chimpanzees and gorillas, but still not a full language in our sense of the term.

The only hyoid bone (important in speech, linked by muscle to the mandible, or lower jaw) to be found on a palaeontological site was discovered in the summer of 1983 in the Kebara cave on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. The skeleton discovered there was dated to 60,000 BP and was labelled Mousterian – i.e., Neanderthal. According to B. Arensburg, of Tel Aviv University, the hyoid bone of this creature ‘resembles that of modern man in configuration and size’ and ‘casts a totally new light on the speech capability of [Neanderthals] . . . Viewed in anatomical terms, it would seem that Mousterian man from Kebara was just as capable of speech as modern man.’³² Neanderthal ear bones recovered in 2004 from excavations in Spain showed that ‘their hearing was attuned to pick up the same frequency as those used in human speech’.

There are a number of other inferences that may be made about early thought, stemming from the inspection of tools and the behaviour of early man and of primates and other mammals. One is the standardisation of stone tools. Is it possible for this to have happened, say some palaeontologists, without language? Language would have been needed, they argue, for the teacher to impress upon the student what the exact form the new tool should be. In the same way, the development of elaborate kin systems would also have required the development of words, to describe the relationships between various relatives. Some primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, have rudimentary kin systems: brothers occasionally recognise each other, and mothers their offspring. But this is not highly developed, is inconsistent and unreliable. Gorilla ‘family units’, for example, are not kin groups as we would recognise them.