Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

27. According to Michael Corballis, professor of psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, language may have developed out of gestures. He makes the point that chimpanzees are much better at sign language than speaking and that, in their brains, the area corresponding to Broca’s area is involved with making and perceiving hand and arm movements. Deaf humans also have no difficulty developing sign languages. Corballis speculates that bipedalism enabled early man to develop hand and facial gestures first and that speech only developed after the rules had been laid down in the brain for grammar, syntax etc. See: Michael Corballis, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: Princeton University Press, 2002. For Kanzi’s ‘words’, see: Anil Ananthaswamy, ‘Has the chimp taught himself to talk?’, New Scientist, 4 January 2003, page 12.

28. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 397.

29. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 27.

30. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 406.

31. Ibid., page 412.

32. Ibid., chapter 10, ‘New skeletal evidence concerning the anatomy of middle Palaeolithic populations in the Middle East: the Kebara skeleton’, especially page 169. ‘Neanderthals not so dumb’, Mark Henderson, The (London) Times, 22 June 2004, page 4.

33. International Herald Tribune, 16 August 2002, page 1.

34. The gene was located in, among other sites, fifteen members of one family living in Britain, all of whom have profound speech defects and all of whom had a defective version of FOXP2.

35. Tore Janson, Speak, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 27.

36. Les Groube, ‘The impact of diseases upon the emergence of agriculture’, in David R. Harris (editor), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, London: University College London Press, 1996, page 103.

37. Johanna Nichols calculates there are 167 American language ‘stocks’. Stephen Oppenheimer observes there are far more languages in South America than in the north. He provides a table, of different parts of the world, calibrating language diversity and period of human occupation. His graph shows essentially a straight line – in other words, there is a strong relation between time depth and language diversity. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 299. For William Sutherland’s claim that there are 6,809 languages in the world, see New Scientist, 17 May 2003, page 22.

38. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 39.

39. Terence Grieder, Origins of Pre-Columbian Art, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.

40. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 304.

41. Colin Renfrew and Daniel Nettle (editors), Nostratic: Examining a Linguistic Macrofamily, Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1999, page 5.

42. Ibid., page 130.

43. Ibid., pages 12–13.

44. Nicholas Wade, ‘Genes are telling 50,000-year-old story of the origins of Europeans’, New York Times, 14 November 2000, page F9.

45. Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., pages 53–67; Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Languages, New York: Wiley, 1994. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995, pages 174–177 and 185–186.

46. Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., page 68.

47. Ibid., pages 68–69.

48. Ibid., pages 54 and 398.

49. Gyula Décsy, ‘Beyond Nostratic in time and space’, in Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., pages 127–135.

50. Steven Pinker and P. Bloom, ‘Natural language and natural selection’, Behavioural and Brain Science, volume 13, 1990, pages 707–784. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, London: Faber & Faber, 1996.

51. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 485.

52. Ibid., page 459.

53. Ibid., pages 468–469.

54. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, Op. cit., page 215.

55. Ibid., page 334.

56. Ibid., pages 333–334.

57. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 356.

58. Alexander Marshack, ‘Upper Palaeolithic notation and symbols’, Science, volume 178, 1972, pages 817–828.

59. Franceso d’Errico, ‘A new model and its implications for the origin of writing: the La Marche Antler revisited’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 5, number 2, October 1995, pages 163–206.

60. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 74.

61. Ibid., page 77.