Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel

7. A Cultural Triad: Language, Religion, Art

7. A Cultural Triad Language, Religion, Art Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws—that is, culture. . . . Culture can be said to be the human adaptation. —Richard Leakey, The Origin of Humankind (1994) Language: Transitional Speech and the Ursprache “[I]t is really little more than a courtesy to call a language the few hundred substantives we possess, the score of all-purpose verbs, the poverty of prepositions and postpositions, the continued reliance upon emphasis, gesture and onomatopoeia to eke out shortages of cases and tenses. —Roy Lewis, What We Did to Father (1960) In Huxley’s view, Victorian man’s humiliation at his discovery of his cousinship to the lower animals might be partly assuaged by the realization that he is a member of a uniquely gifted species: “He alone possesses the marvelous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby . . . he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and trans- figured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.” (Evidence, 104). After Darwin, if culture was the key to human nature, then language, our chief means of accumulating, organizing, and transmitting knowledge, was surely the key to culture. But how was human language different in kind from the communication systems of our “humble fellows,” and how did it originate? Huxley’s admission that human language was a “marvelous endowment ” was seized upon by creationists. The anti-Darwinian biologist 173 ▲ St. George Mivart, for example, noted that even among the lowest savages no example could be found of “men in a nascent state as to the power of speech” (50), proving that man’s linguistic gift had not evolved but had come to us fully formed from the Creator. Consequently Darwin, when addressing the origin of human language, was far more circumspect than Huxley had been. On the one hand, “Articulate language is . . . peculiar to man” (Descent, 1:54); it “is an art, like brewing or baking”; and “[i]t certainly is not a true instinct, as every language has to be learnt” (1:55). On the other, parrots are also capable of articulate speech; the inarticulate cries that we make in common with the lower animals “are more expressive than any words” (1:54); and “man has an instinctive tendency to speak . . . whilst no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write” (1:55). Darwin’s apparently self-contradictory musings reveal his extraordinary care to take into account all possible approaches to the remarkable phenomenon of human language. But for many of his disciples , the manifest fact of linguistic evolution proved not only that humans had evolved from lower creatures but also that some humans had evolved more than others. The record of extinct languages was much fuller than the fossil record,1 so detailed linguistic genealogies could be constructed. The philologists who did so tended to work from two faulty assumptions: that there had been an exact correspondence in prehistory between language and race; and that their own language was the most perfect. Consequently, they concluded that those languages farthest from their own on the evolutionary tree were the most imperfect, and those languages’ speakers the most racially inferior. In 1848 the German philologist August Schleicher had divided all languages into three groups of unequal status. Isolating languages (for example, Chinese) were the simplest, consisting of unchanging monosyllabic root words. Agglutinating languages (for example, Turkish) affixed relational elements to these roots. Inflecting languages (for example , German) were the most complex, with an “organic” relation between a transformable root and affixes that allowed flexibility and subtlety of expression. Moreover, there was a direct relation between the complexity of a language and how far the “race” that spoke it could develop culturally. That languages could be arranged in families of different orders of complexity supported polygenism. Schleicher “believed that there was no one Ursprache [original language] whence the other languages descended; rather there were many Ursprachen, Thematic Evolution 174 ▲ each having developed in different geographical regions out of cries of emotion, imitation, and ejaculation. Since language and thought were two sides of...