Before The Word, Perhaps The Wink?

; Some
Language Experts Think Humans Spoke First With
Gestures
By EMILY EAKIN

Published: Saturday, May 18, 2002

''What a hairy back!'' was Lily Tomlin's candidate for the first
human sentence. But whatever the content of that original remark,
if Michael C. Corballis is correct, it was expressed in gestures, not
words.
Mr. Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, in New
Zealand, is the latest proponent of a controversial idea known
among language experts as the ''gestural theory.'' In essence,
gestural theorists contend that long before early humans spoke
they jabbered away with their hands.
Where language comes from remains one of human evolution's
enduring puzzles. But in a new book, ''From Hand to Mouth: The
Origins of Language'' (Princeton Univerity Press), Mr. Corballis
pluckily takes a stand, arguing that speech was an ingenious
innovation but not quite the freakish marvel that linguists have
often made it out to be. Proposing that human ancestors made the
switch from gestures to speech quite recently -- he puts the date at
around 50,000 years ago, a mere yesterday in evolutionary terms
-- Mr. Corballis believes that language itself, and the sophisticated
mental capacities necessary to produce it, are far older.
''The common ancestor of five or six million years ago would have
been utterly incapable of a telephone conversation but would have
been able to make voluntary movements of the hands and face that
could at least serve as a platform upon which to build a language,''
he writes. ''Grammatical language may well have begun to emerge
around two million years ago but would at first have been
primarily gestural, though no doubt punctuated with grunts and
other vocal cries that were at first largely involuntary and
emotional.''
It sounds plausible enough. All you have to do is look around to see
how much hand-waving still accompanies human communication
today -- even people on cell phones do it. But Mr. Corballis has yet
to convince many linguists of the theory's merits.
''He's not a linguist, and I think he doesn't appreciate the
sophistication of grammatical organization,'' said Ray Jackendoff,
a professor of linguistics at Brandeis University. ''I never saw any
reason one way or the other to say that language started gesturally
rather than vocally. If it started in the gestural modality, you still
have to explain how in switching to that vocal modality there's this
terrific adaptation.''
Here, of course, the fossil record is of little help. As Mr. Jackendoff
put it: ''The problem of talking about the evolution of language in
any detail is that there is no evidence. It's pure speculation.''
But that hasn't stopped scholars from pursuing all manner of
theories -- or engaging in charged debate. In 1866, the Linguistic
Society of Paris banned all discussion of the evolution of language
-- presumably in order to keep tempers in check. A few years later,
Charles Darwin ventured that human speech may have evolved
from animal cries, a notion that was famously derided by his
opponents as the ''bow-wow'' theory. The French philosopher Abbé
Étienne de Condillac, whom Mr. Corballis credits with being the
first gestural theorist, took a more strategic tack: when he
presented his theory in 1746, he delivered it in the form of a fable
so as not to arouse the ire of the Catholic Church. (In those days,
the official wisdom was that language came from God.)
In recent decades, resistance to the origins question has come less
from clerics than from cutting-edge linguists and biologists. For
example, Noam Chomsky, the M.I.T. professor whose ideas have
dominated the field for more than 40 years, has often been accused
of depicting language as a trait so remarkable that natural selection
is virtually helpless to explain it.
Mr. Chomsky's celebrated theory of Universal Grammar supposes
that human languages share an underlying set of rules that are
innate rather than learned. But some readers of his work have
taken him to mean that the capacity for language arose all at once
rather than incrementally, the product of what one critic derisively
termed ''the cognitive equivalent to the Big Bang.''
Lately, however, Darwinian accounts of language have begun to
proliferate, buoyed by new research on primate communication
and human sign language as well as the more general scholarly
vogue for evolutionary theory. In his 1994 best seller, ''The
Language Instinct,'' the M.I.T. professor Steven Pinker eloquently
defended the idea that language evolved by natural selection,
though he conceded that ''the first steps toward language are a
mystery.'' (If forced to speculate, he added, he would be inclined to
bet on primate calls rather than gestures as a likely precurser to
speech.)
Mr. Pinker's book seems to have opened a floodgate of
possibilities. In 1996, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar
proposed that language had evolved from primate grooming
behavior. Among apes and monkeys, physical contact -- tickling,
scratching and picking at each other's lice -- functions as social
glue, establishing hierarchies and alliances and communicating
empathy or remorse. But back-scratching a whole band of baboons
takes time. As early hominid populations expanded, Mr. Dunbar
theorizes, speech simply became the more efficient option -- think
of it as a kind of group massage.
More recently, Peter MacNeilage and Barbara Davis, researchers at
the University of Texas at Austin, have developed an ''ingestive
theory,'' which links the evolution of speech to the movements the
mouth makes while chewing. ''The mouth closes and opens in
chewing just as it closes for consonants and opens for vowels,'' Mr.
MacNeilage explained in a telephone interview.
Meanwhile, Michael Arbib, a computational neuroscientist at the
University of Southern California, is working on a variant of the
gestural theory based on the discovery of similarities in the way
human brains recognize language and monkey brains recognize
gestures.
''The whole field is not settled,'' said William Calvin, a
neurobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose
own theory is that language evolved from the rapid mental reflexes
required to, say, throw a spear at a running mammoth.
''Everybody's got a theory.''
Mr. Corballis says evidence to support the gestural theory is
growing. Researchers now know, for example, that sign languages
are as grammatically sophisticated as spoken ones. Moreover, both
speech and signing depend on the left side of the brain -- the same
side that happens to control most people's dominant hand, the
right one.
From an evolutionary standpoint, Mr. Corballis argues, the
gestural theory has several advantages. For one thing, it would
help explain why chimpanzees -- mankind's close cousins -- are
adept at learning forms of sign language and notorious failures
when it comes to imitating human speech or even controlling their
own cries.
Moreover, he suggests, the upright posture adopted by early
hominids -- humans' apelike ancestors -- as long as two million
years ago would have facilitated hand-based communication.
''Bipedalism encouraged manual gesturing,'' Mr. Corballis said in a
talk at a recent Harvard University conference on language and
evolution.
He hinted that gestural theory could clear up another mystery
about this period as well: why the stone tools of these early
hominids show little evolution for almost two million years,
despite increases in brain size. What if these bipedal creatures
were so caught up in five-fingered chit-chat that it got in the way of
their tool making? In the 1970's, one anthropologist went so far as
to suggest that the reason humans evolved unpigmented palms --
unlike other primates -- is so their hand signals would show up
better around the campfire at night.
That leaves the sticky questions of why and when these
hypothetical skillful signers bothered to switch to speech. For a
while, Mr. Corballis speculates, they probably used a mix of both.
Then, about 50,000 years ago, there was a momentous change: an
explosion of technology, cave art, textiles and even musical
instruments. Mr. Corballis's interpretation? Freed from the task of
communicating, hominid hands were finally able to get down to
the real toil of creating civilization.
But his most provocative idea is that human ancestors stopped
gesturing and started talking not because their brains underwent a
sudden mutation -- a cognitive Big Bang -- but rather because it
seemed to some Homo sapiens at the time like a good idea. He
called the advent of autonomous speech a ''cultural invention,'' like
writing, and one that ''may have occurred long after it became
possible.''
And once speech caught on, he argues, it gave Homo sapiens a
decisive advantage over less verbal rivals, including Homo erectus
and the Neanderthals, whose lines eventually died out. ''We talked
them out of existence,'' Mr. Corballis said with a satisfied grin.
The gestural theory makes for a captivating story. Yet like so many
other theories, it may turn out to be little more than that. The
question of where language comes from may simply be
unanswerable, said Richard Lewontin, a professor of biology at
Harvard. ''If you don't have a closely related species with a similar
trait you have the problem of novelty,'' he said. ''And what you and
I are doing right now, no bonobo or chimpanzee will ever do.''
Mr. Chomsky agreed. ''This task intrigues people because it's about
us,'' he said. ''But that doesn't make it a scientific question. It may
be important for us to know where we came from, but if we can't
answer that question scientifically, we can't answer it. If you want
to tell stories, well then, tell stories.''
Photos: Language theorists who believe gestures preceded speech
point out how easily chimpanzees, mankind's close cousins, pick
up sign language. Here Sean is saying, ''Give me that food!''