The Origin of Language review: Did childcare fuel language? A new book makes the case

The origin of the language
Madeleine Beekman (Simon & Schuster)

Language is one of the few faculties that still seem only human. Other animals, such as chimpanzees and singing birds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none seems to transmit such a range and a depth of meaning than ours. So how and why did our ancestors first develop a language?

The evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman has spent a large part of her career studying insects, in particular bees. In her first book for a non -specialist audience, she largely plugs into proposing an explanation of the evolution of human language.

Her idea is that she has evolved out of necessity, to allow us to face the requirements of childcare services. Compared to other mammals, human infants are exceptionally underdeveloped at birth, requiring care 24 hours a day.

According to the traces of decades of paleoanthropological research, Beekman connects helpless babies to two characteristics of human bodies: bipedality and large brains. “While our skeletons adapted to the right walk, our hips have become narrower,” she writes. Later, our brain has also widened. “Babies with a large head and mothers with narrow hips do not make a good combination,” observes Beekman, Drily.

To get around this “obstetric dilemma”, babies are born early, before their heads became too large to sneak into the birth channel. This allows humans to give birth in complete safety, at the cost of the months spent taking care of vulnerable infants.

So far, so familiar. Beekman’s big leap is his proposal that the requirements to take care of human babies have led the evolution of complex language. “Taking care of human infants is so singularly difficult that evolution had to develop a brand new tool to help effort,” she wrote, and “the fault of design that started the problem in the first place also provided its solution”. Our brains have made birth more difficult, but they also allowed us to evolve a rich and flexible language capacity.

By proposing this idea, Beekman wades in a very congested market. Many scenarios have been proposed for the evolution of the language. Some say that it has developed in concert with technologies such as stone tools: as we created more advanced tools, we needed a more descriptive language to teach others how to make and use them. Or maybe the language was a way to show up, including through the play on words and the insults full of mind. Again, this could have allowed individuals to organize their own thoughts and was only used secondarily to communicate with others.

An attractive aspect of Beekman’s proposal is that he places women and children in the center. Because science has traditionally been biased towards the male, ideas on human evolution tended to focus too much on them (“the man the hunter” and all this), despite the fact that some of the most dramatic changes in our evolution implied pregnancy.

It is good to consider the roles of women and children in the origin of the language. However, this does not necessarily mean that Beekman is right. She masters intriguing evidence, especially that all large brain birds, including parrots and crows again Caledonians, produce under cooked offspring. For what? A 2023 study has shown that the strongest predictor of brain size in birds was the quantity of parental provisioning.

All this seems clearly human and in accordance with the story of Beekman. But the biggest problem is timing. Humans have been bipeded for at least 6 million years and our brain quickly passed over 2 million years ago. When, at this time, has childbirth become really difficult and when language has evolved?

Beekman maintains that the language is only about 100,000 years old and is unique to our species. It quotes a 2020 study identifying “the regulation networks of unique genes which affect the anatomical structures necessary for the production of precise words”. These networks are apparently only present in our species, suggesting that other hominins and Neanderthals could not speak as well as humans.

Beekman says that it “nails”, but other researchers have found evidence suggesting a complex discourse for having existed in other homestones. The evolution of human childbirth is also tangled and uncertain. In short: a nice idea, needs more evidence.

Michael Marshall is a writer based in Devon, in the United Kingdom,

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