Ancient humans only evolved language once, but why?

My son is a sorcerer. He enters the kitchen, looks at me and pronounces the magic words: “Can I have a cheese and tomato sandwich, please?” A few minutes later, such a snack appeared in front of him.

Other young animals can communicate their desire for food through grunts, tweets and grunts. But only humans have the sophisticated grammar and vocabulary system that allows us to communicate in specific terms.

In fact, with studies on animals showing more and more that they share many characteristics which were once the reserve of humans – from culture to emotions and even morality – language may seem the only thing that really distinguishes us. “I think that language makes us feel special as a species,” said Brian Lerch at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Given all of this, one of the main things that researchers want to know about language is how it has evolved, and why he did only in our human line.

Psychologist Shimon Edelman at Cornell University in New York State thinks that the magic power of the language has a fairly simple evolutionary explanation. With his colleague Oren Kolodny, now at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he argues that he may have emerged 1.7 million years ago, when former humans began to make stone hand axes that go beyond the ability of non-human animals to produce.

The idea is that manufacturers of novice tools would have needed an expert advice to carry out their own hand axes, so that the tool manufacturing sites have become classrooms. Proto -language could have emerged as a way for teachers to communicate to students – which could explain why language and the creation of tools seem to demand that the brain organize and orders thoughts in structured sequences.

But about ten years ago, key experience challenged this point of view. In 2014, Shelby Putt in Illinois State University and his colleagues instructed 24 volunteers to learn to make a hand axes of an expert who spoke them through the process or simply made the tools in the presence of volunteers while occasionally pointing to attract their attention. Surprisingly, the two methods were effective, which suggests that verbal language is not necessary for the manufacture of complex tools.

This does not mean that Putt considers the language and the manufacture of tools as completely unconnected. She thinks that the manufacture of complex tools has really forced humans to organize and order that their thoughts remain on the task. This, she argues, has led to the expansion of the regions of the brain involved in working memory, which we use to hold and briefly manipulate ideas.

But Putt suspects that it is only a later date that humans have used this capacity to structure and order their thoughts to develop a language – probably because it has helped them to communicate better and stimulate their chances of survival.

These scenarios all assume that language is fundamentally a tool to communicate with others. But it may not be the case. A third way to think about the evolution of language is almost exclusively focused on how it can help individuals “talk to each other” and organize their thoughts to undertake complex tasks.

According to some, including the linguist influence Noam Chomsky, this is what led the evolution of language, which means that it had nothing to do with the manufacture of tools. Instead, these researchers think that language emerged 70,000 years ago, perhaps simply because of a random genetic mutation that caused the brain.

To tell the truth, there is still little consensus on how the language was born. But if Chomsky and his fellow men are right, even if it did not imply magic, it could at least have implied a little luck.