Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

9. Emerging from the Cocoon

CHAPTER 9 Emerging from the Cocoon r-r-'HUS FAR, these pages have suggested that language began when 1..visible gestures were used to represent the actions of beings or changes in the state or location ofobjects.This conclusion, in turn, however , raises an equally searching query: How and why would visible language signs have relinquished their function to vocal signs? Or, as opponents ofa gestural origin theory would ask: If there ever was a gesturallanguage , why has it degenerated into nonverbal communication? If language is the special part of human nature that we think it is, why would the expression of it have changed channels? Why would visible actions, which can make language signs naturally and show directly what they signify, have given way to the unlikely use of human voices to make language signs arbitrarily? First, it is important to realize that before humans appeared, animals had evolved with at least a limited ability to conceptualize. Many nonhuman animals have a clear conception of what is food and what is not, for example, and which situations are safe, which are dangerous. Chimpanzees can go further than this in making sense, for them, of that part of the world they live in. Entirely apart from human intervention they learn to make a few signs, such as the one that connects food with a request to share it. The next step would be a dawning recognition by hominid sign makers that their gestural signs were connectinJ.:-were making 131 132 EmergingJrom the Cocoon a connection between something that could act and the actions it performed , or between something and the changes that happened to it. Some of the offspring of the early human line must have been brighter and quicker to visualize than others and so been prone to doing things in new ways. What these innovators were doing would have been both visible and invisible. With their hands they would have been doing things that the other members of the troop did. They would have been using gestures to communicate a few requests and demands. But the brighter ones must have been paying closer attention to these movements everyone saw, for inside their developing consciousness they would have seen that their own movements resembled things and actions they were looking at. At that juncture they would have begun to make these actions intentionally. Such activity would have led to new brain-eye-hand neuronal circuits. And with the new neuronal group mappings of what their hands and eyes were doing-making signs that combined elements and their relations-language would have been born, a language made of visible signs. Visible language signs are detected by the sensory system that evolved in primates, who for ages had lived in trees above the forest floor. Their way oflife demanded vision for seeing and deciding, for example, "Is that branch safe to leap to?" It also demanded vision adapted for judging distance , speed, and depth and the coordination of vision with motor acts (i.e., binocular vision, not vision divided by the muzzle as in other quadrupeds ).Vision for primates was a key to continued existence. But vision alone was insufficient.Vision had to be coordinated with the movement of limbs evolved to act in ways compatible with what was seen and felt, grasped and let go. Most primates' sense of hearing is important too, but it does not need to differ in any major way from that of other social mammals. Mammalian as well as primate infants, if they are to survive, must learn early to recognize and respond with appropriate behavior to a mother's call or cry, a predator's shriek or roar, and to other sounds, like calls to the family or troop to assemble or disperse or repel invaders. Sounds, actually sound-response pairs, are common features of the life of many species. Sounds facilitated communication and still do for Emergingfrom the Cocoon 133 arboreal monkeys and apes. However, after the anthropoid primates came down from the trees, a radical difference in anatomy and its uses occurred. Some of these new primates not only gave up using their front limbs for walking but began to use them in new ways. Chimpanzees use their hands and arms to dig up tubers, make probes to pull out termites, and crack nuts with stones. Hominids must have begun to make more and different kinds of tools for more...